To investigate the Irish in eighteenth-century London might suggest two very different types of inquiry: shadowing Dorothy George, George Rudé, and Peter Linebaugh in a search for the Irish underclass who fetched and carried and who were too often on the windy side of the law; or, working within a much larger literature, an exploration of the intimate world of the Burkes, the Sheridans, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Moore, and Viscount Castlereagh, the client networks they supported, and the Irish causes they championed. Only very recently have other Irish Londons attracted attention, and not until the 2012 conference The London Irish in the Long Eighteenth Century, organized by David O'Shaughnessy in Warwick, did the subject begin to become fashionable. That conference came shortly after the publication of Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010), itself a conference collection and edited by Stana Nenadic. Both gatherings were strongly interdisciplinary, with the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of two prominent sets of non-English Londoners held up to scrutiny.
Craig Bailey has, however, been studying Irish Londoners for a much longer time, and he was the first to focus specifically on the eighteenth-century professional and mercantile networks that had their origins in Ireland. This elegantly constructed monograph is the result. It rests on a number of distinct but complementary projects undertaken by the author: a close examination of the worlds of the Irish law student in the city, of the Irish legal fraternity there, and of the variegated merchant houses that were Irish in one sense or another. Bailey provides a series of finely textured probes, some collective biographies, and some case studies. He uses entirely fresh archival sources that establish with new precision the regional origins, the size, and the interconnections of Irish students, lawyers, and merchant houses that had a presence, sometimes briefly, in the city. Bailey implies that the total number of Londoners defined here as middle-class Irish was at any one time (and including dependents) less than a thousand in the third quarter of the century (see 6), which means that numerically they were completely overshadowed by Irish dockers and porters and their families (with whom, it seems, they had very little contact). However the wealth and political heft of these middle-class groups was substantially greater than their numbers might suggest. It was less, of course, than that of the Scots, although just how far that comparison can be determined is not examined here at all.
The geographical extension of several of these London Irish families is, however, pursued in some detail to India and to the Caribbean, notably through William Hickey's journals and via the Grove archive, and this analysis helps dispels any notion that “Irish merchants” in London handled only linen and came entirely from Ulster. Many of the most successful London Irish merchants indeed had northern origins (although they were more Anglican than Presbyterian and linked more to Derry than Belfast), but it was the global reach into the French and Spanish diplomatic and trading worlds available to some of the southern Catholic lawyers, brokers, and merchants—leviathans like the Stacpooles, Daniel Macnamara, and the Fitzgeralds—which is so striking. Many years ago Jacob Price recognized the strategic importance of the Fitzgeralds in the European tobacco trade, but they can now be placed within a much larger picture.
Bailey sets out to demonstrate how “migration was a learning experience that facilitated change and allowed for more inclusive understandings of Irish identity . . . . Strong ties developed around . . . affiliations of kinship, religion and locality, but migrants also found that the shared experience of being Irish abroad created the potential for cooperation” (14). However it is not clear two hundred pages later whether that claim has been proved. Certainly some tantalizing evidence of cross-hatching connections is presented, both of business and of social reciprocity between kin-based and regional or confessional networks. But what is more striking are the powerful subnational groups that Bailey has uncovered busily looking after their own, whether in the legal, financial, or commercial spheres, and such evidence is on its own terms quite intriguing. Thus by mapping over several decades the regional origins and kinship clusters entering the Inns, particularly Middle Temple, some very strong patterns emerge, suggesting powerful social elevators at work in which parts of southwest and northwestern Ireland figure far more prominently than might be expected. But to substantiate the claim that a shared sense of national identity had “operative value” would require closer analysis of philanthropic activity (the non-denominational Benevolent Society of St. Patrick set up in 1784 would be of interest here), of marriage alliances, and recreational patterns. That said, the importance of certain social hubs, like the King's Arms in Pall Mall for the Irish gentry and the Grecian Coffee House beside Middle Temple for professional Irish London, is superbly depicted (78–86, 112). But as Bailey himself concedes, this leaves many dimensions of non-plebeian Irish London yet to be explored, not least the domestic sphere and gender relations, religious patronage and devotional practice, the theatre, the press, and the political salon—in other words, the West End and Southwark as well as the city—which, taken together, may give a very different coloration to the argument.
Yet despite this reviewer's hesitation, the unifying process that Bailey seeks to locate—the fashioning of a more inclusive Irish identity among those who operated in the peculiar environment that was eighteenth-century London—may well not only be true but be really important in shaping Irish culture and politics back at home in the late eighteenth century and beyond the Union. In no contemporary Irish city did the different denominations active in business and the public sphere interact in the unproblematic and uncontentious ways that they did in London, and this at a time when the cultural influence of London on Ireland was becoming greater than ever before, reflecting trends in communications, publishing, commerce, and travel. Did this more level playing field in London matter? We do not really know yet.
