During the mid-nineteenth century Irish migrants to urban Britain were subject to an increasingly hostile public gaze that identified them as an intractable social problem. This development was rooted in deep-seated cultural suspicions of the Irish, but it acquired its force at this particular juncture largely because of the tensions arising from rapid urban growth and industrialization. In this context, one of the biggest methodological challenges facing historians of this minority ethnic group is how to appraise the large volume of writings about them that were, by and large, produced by non-Irish people. One response to this problem has been to shift the focus of research towards the ‘hard’ quantitative data found in the census enumerator's books. An advantage of this shift is that it has underlined the crucial social differentiation of what was often portrayed as a homogeneous ethnic group. Research based on these sources has questioned the assertions about Irish residential segregation and their supposed cultural isolation in mid-nineteenth-century British towns.Footnote 1 In spite of the immense gains made by such research, however, qualitative data – although problematic – remains an important source that requires critical evaluation. As recent research on the Irish and the cult of respectability has demonstrated, how one was perceived in Victorian towns mattered.Footnote 2 Perceptions had the potential to constitute an urban ‘reality’ in their own right, albeit one less susceptible to quantification.
This article examines a neglected source for understanding the Irish and attitudes to them in the Victorian town: the reports of the Morning Chronicle newspaper that covered the non-metropolitan areas of England and Wales. It focuses on the ways in which a particular view of the Irish was constructed in the case of the iron-manufacturing town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales. It will argue that the dominant mode of investigative reporting in mid-century was influenced by an emerging mass commodity culture and that the discursive practices of some journalists located the Irish poor outside that material culture. Furthermore, it will argue that once observers shifted their attention away from London and the problems of the metropolis their social commentary was much more susceptible to being read in different ways depending on the local context in which it was received. Thus, the reports on ‘Labour and the Poor’ were initially published in the Morning Chronicle as part of a patchwork of articles on the different towns and regions of Britain, but sometimes they were re-printed in the local newspaper press of the particular town that was the object of the outsider's gaze. At that point they became part of a subtly different discourse; journalistic practices of this kind opened up cultural spaces for different understandings of the same text.
Labour and the poor
The path-breaking investigative journalism of Henry Mayhew on ‘Labour and the Poor’ in London, first published in the Morning Chronicle in 1849, aimed to discover the causes and extent of poverty in the metropolis by examining the conditions of employment in different trades. His reports yielded a large volume of data about work practices and wages, as well as commentary on how these related to the precarious lifestyles of the poor. The investigations have been mined for evidence of the apparently authentic voices of powerless people in society, while the strengths and weaknesses of his methodology have been minutely scrutinized.Footnote 3 At the time of their publication his investigations provided a new challenge to journalists by setting an exacting standard for analysing the life experiences of the poor and how those experiences could be represented to a wider readership. Consequently, Mayhew's work has been used as a yardstick against which later Victorian enquiries into poverty in London have been measured.
Compared with the attention devoted to the London enquiries, however, the Morning Chronicle's subsequent investigations into ‘Labour and the Poor’ outside the metropolis – which were inspired by the London enquiries – have been underused.Footnote 4 These reports, published during the years 1849–51, provide fascinating evidence about social and economic conditions in different towns and regions. They contain a great deal of evidence about the Irish, including important information about the migrants' wages and living conditions.Footnote 5 These non-metropolitan ‘letters’, as they were styled, adopted a different methodology to those published on London and were researched and written by a variety of correspondents. The context in which they were printed is also of significance for evaluating the message they conveyed to the newspaper's predominantly middle-class audience. The non-metropolitan letters appeared serially, and individual instalments about different towns and regions were printed side-by-side on the same or facing pages of the newspaper, creating the effect of a geographical mosaic of reports. Effectively the newspaper was engaged in the process of mapping the new social realities of urban Britain. Its mode of reporting, occurring at a time when towns received a significant number of refugees from the Irish famine of 1845–50, ensured that Irish migrants were perceived not only as outsiders, but as a group segregated from the host society. This was a key feature of this ‘mapping’ of the country.
Discovering how the poor lived acquired particular urgency in a society in which there was growing anxiety about the social differentiation of towns and cities along spatial lines. This sense of a society solidifying into different social blocs that were becoming increasingly estranged from one another inspired some of the most perceptive social observation of the nineteenth century. Chartism had brought home to members of the middle class the potential threat to their social position from the mobilization of political identities along this divide, and although the threatened Chartist uprising of 1848 failed to materialize, it was clear that the gulf between social classes had not narrowed. By 1849 Chartism was on the wane, but other social problems posed an equally potent threat to social harmony, in particular poverty and disease. The cholera epidemic of 1849, for example, provided contemporaries with graphic evidence of the tensions that could be generated by unregulated conditions in the towns. It was in this context that Mayhew's ‘Labour and the Poor’ series was devised.
The Irish migrant population formed a crucially important object of the journalistic gaze at the outset of the investigative tradition in British journalism. This tradition depended on the construction of an ‘Other’, whether in terms of ‘the poor’ or the ‘working classes’ that formed a counter point to the experiences of an idealized middle-class reading public. In the case of Irish migrants, ethnicity and social status were conflated, so that the Irish poor (or the ‘low Irish’, as they were habitually described) came to represent the migrant community in its entirety. As Donald M. MacRaild has argued, it appears that the Irish were used ‘as a control to illustrate just how low certain types of the labouring poor might sink’.Footnote 6 To this extent, the Irish were fitted into a pattern of class relations against which the English were implicitly (but never explicitly) defined. In the case of the Morning Chronicle report on south Wales, the reports had the additional dimension of contrasting two ethnic groups that were both sometimes the object of a hostile metropolitan gaze, the minority of Irish migrants and the majority of native Welsh. In these reports the contrast between the two groups was one of the structuring elements of the investigations rather than an incidental feature of them. This is one clear contrast with Mayhew's investigations of the London Irish, which presented a range of voices rather than stark opposites.Footnote 7
Unlike the letters on London by Mayhew and the other non-metropolitan letters on the various regions of England and Scotland, it has proved difficult to identify with certainty the author of the reports on Wales.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, contextual and stylistic evidence indicates that the journalist, who has been designated ‘the first sociologist of Wales’,Footnote 9 was probably Angus Bethune Reach, a Scot who authored all 32 of the letters on the English manufacturing districts in the series. The distinctive style of writing he developed in the English reports is also evident in those in Wales. As we shall see, he attempted to convey the immediacy of places and experiences to the reader, in a novelistic manner that drew them into the account as virtual spectators of the people and events being described. It was ‘picturesque’ without yielding to sensationalism.Footnote 10 If Reach was not the author of the Welsh reports he had a very close imitator.
The author of the Welsh reports was well prepared for the task: he had visited south Wales several times between 1835 and 1840 (including a visit to Merthyr in 1838) and he had read all the important government enquiries into social and economic conditions in the region that had been produced in the 1830s and 1840s. Moreover, he had corresponded with key figures in the town, like the industrialist and stipendiary magistrate H.A. Bruce (later Lord Aberdare) and the Anglican rector J.C. Cambell, both of whom had made systematic studies of aspects of social life in the town and who were able to pass on their detailed knowledge and insights into urban life.Footnote 11 This earlier contact with the town raises the issue of context acutely. Not only is it necessary to situate the anonymous correspondent in the context of the Morning Chronicle enquiries, it is also important to relate his investigations to the development of social commentary in nineteenth-century Wales more generally. The reports fed into debates within the town, especially as some of the Morning Chronicle reports were reproduced in whole or in part in the local press. It is significant, for example, that the local press greeted the arrival of the correspondent in Merthyr with the announcement that he was ‘spying out the filth and nakedness of the land’.Footnote 12 The accusation that government ‘spies’ had been sent to pronounce adversely on the moral character of the Welsh in the hugely contentious Education Reports of 1847 was still fresh in the mind.Footnote 13
The urban context
If Manchester was England's ‘mythopoetic city’,Footnote 14 eulogized and demonized in print in the early nineteenth century as the quintessence of industrial capitalism, then Merthyr Tydfil occupied a comparable position in Wales. It had grown from a small village in the middle of the eighteenth century to become the largest town in Wales a century later. In 1851 it had a population of 46,378, with an Irish-born contingent of 3,051 (6.6 per cent). The town's small Irish community created its own fledgling institutions, including a Catholic church and school, which catered almost exclusively for the migrants and their offspring.Footnote 15 The ports of the region had higher proportions of Irish settlers in 1851, especially Cardiff (18.1 per cent) and Newport (10.7 per cent), but the overall number of Irish settlers in each of these ports was similar to that of Merthyr. Moreover, these coastal towns, which experienced the direct effects of the famine influx during the late 1840s, had more developed ethnic Irish associational networks by this date than did Merthyr, partly because of the small Irish middle-class presence in them that Merthyr lacked. Throughout south Wales there was a small Irish presence in towns dating from before the famine that was substantially augmented during the crisis years of 1845–50.Footnote 16
Merthyr's spectacular growth from its origins as a small isolated village in the early eighteenth century to that of a substantial industrial settlement by the mid-nineteenth century was based entirely on the decision to mine and work iron locally. The town's location in the uplands of south Wales gave its urban development a particularly fragmented character, occurring as it did in the form of a group of industrial settlements surrounding individual ironworks with weak civic institutions to unite them.Footnote 17 This feature distinguished the town from other major settlements in the regions and possibly made the integration of the Irish more difficult. Merthyr's class structure was relatively simple; the iron masters were Englishmen, some of whose forebears had made their initial fortunes in the slave trade through Bristol before turning their attention to south Wales, where they found new ways of putting their capital to work. Separated from their workers by wealth, status and language, their connections with the human society around them was frequently strained.Footnote 18 The overwhelming majority of the industrial work force was Welsh-born and Welsh-speaking, and in 1845 it was estimated that approximately a third of the population could speak English ‘intelligibly’.Footnote 19 Protestant Nonconformity had made significant inroads into working-class culture.Footnote 20
The gulf between ‘masters’ and ‘men’ in the first half of the nineteenth century was not always successfully mediated by the small middle-class ‘shopocracy’, and the town was notorious for its political instability, attracting the unfavourable attention of politicians, journalists and social reformers. In 1800–01, for example, the town was convulsed by food riots and it was occupied by the workers for nearly a week until troops were drafted in to restore the state's authority. Five men were hanged for their part in the events of that week. The military was used again during the bitter strike of 1816. In June 1831, during the Reform Crisis, there was a popular uprising that has come to be seen as one of the pivotal examples of workers' rebellion during the early industrial revolution.Footnote 21 Disruption to the local economy caused by the rising prompted many Irish workers to leave the town in search of work elsewhere. Political instability affected the willingness of Irish migrants to remain in the locality and adversely affected their ability to create durable ethnic institutions.Footnote 22
Because of the rising of 1831, the authorities feared Chartism in both 1839 (when an armed uprising occurred in the neighbouring industrial areas of Monmouthshire) and in 1848, but on both occasions Merthyr remained quiet. During 1848 there were fears that Irish Repealers and Welsh Chartists would unite in a common cause locally.Footnote 23 The town also acquired an unenviable reputation as the quintessential crime capital of Wales. The ‘China’ (Pontystorehouse) district of the town became synonymous with an unregulated criminal class. The over representation of the Irish in crime statistics was a well-known feature of town life, with the stipendiary magistrate claiming that fully one third of offences were committed by the Irish. Footnote 24 By the end of the 1840s epidemic diseases, especially cholera, had come to excite the attention and anxieties of contemporaries.Footnote 25 During the cholera epidemic of 1849, for example, Welsh antipathy to the Irish increased as a result of the belief that the Irish ‘imported the disease to Merthyr’.Footnote 26 Thus, the Morning Chronicle's investigations of ‘Labour and the Poor’ in the town were published at a pivotal time in the town's history, when political protest was waning and the Irish were being identified as a defining urban problem.
Merthyr Tydfil and the Morning Chronicle
The fifteen substantial ‘letters’ of the Morning Chronicle's special correspondent on south Wales were published between 4 March 1850 and 26 April 1850. They investigated conditions in the iron-manufacturing towns of Merthyr, Dowlais and Tredegar, a group of smaller settlements in the region's coalfield, and the copper industry at Swansea. There were occasional references to the Irish in a number of these reports, but on one occasion an entire ‘letter’ on Merthyr was devoted to the Irish, depicting this group more systematically.Footnote 27 The focus of this report was strikingly different to that found in previous and subsequent reports in the series about south Wales. Elsewhere in the series readers encountered the Irish in the workplace, such as at the docks in Swansea and the ironworks at Merthyr. The report of an interview with Irish labourers at the Dowlais Iron Works is characteristic of this approach. The reporter commented on one part of the industrial process: ‘I should say that the “cinder-fillers”, who attend to the loading of trains with slag – a laborious duty exposed to great heat – earn on an average, as they told me, 10s. 6d. a week. These men are mostly Irish.’Footnote 28 According to his observation, the higher-status occupations like puddling were restricted to the Welsh.Footnote 29 However, in the article devoted solely to the Irish, the focus was entirely on the domestic environment of this minority group. Consequently, the picture that emerges is of a group disproportionately characterized by women, children and sick males in a town dominated by heavy industry that had a disproportionate number of young and economically active males, both in the population at large and among the Irish.
The tone and language of the article is of crucial significance for its reception. It establishes for the reader both the sincerity of the investigator and the fact that his report is grounded in personal observation; both characteristics were deemed essential for establishing his credentials as a trustworthy observer. For example, at the outset the reader is warned that even though Ireland was in difficulties (a reference to the famine that had occurred during the previous five years), the truth about it must be told, no matter how unpalatable that it might be: ‘Ireland is now prostrate, and it seems hard to strike her. But Truth has neither predilections nor antipathies, and recognizes no distinction of nations. My duty is to describe the labouring classes and the poor; and the Irish must not be overlooked.’Footnote 30 The promise is that observation-based knowledge will proffer a truer picture of social reality for the scrutiny of the fair-minded and objective reader than any presuppositions based on cultural bias or ‘racial’ difference, and that the correspondent will not flinch from telling the unvarnished ‘Truth’, no matter what his sympathies with a downtrodden people might be. All partiality must be cast aside in the light of incontrovertible evidence. Both the text's moral and empirical authority derive from the journalist's supposedly ‘objective’ voice, even though that anonymous and disembodied sensibility inevitably sieved and ordered the material for publication.
Central to this approach was the fact that the writer did not efface himself from the text. In contrast to some of Mayhew's investigations in London, which often edited out the questions asked of informants, the person of the correspondent is always present in this report in spite of his anonymity, while the voices of the poor themselves are less audible than in the reports on London.Footnote 31 The reader is always aware of the correspondent mediating between them and the urban conditions being observed. This effect was achieved by the use of the first person singular throughout the report and the emphasis on the validity of direct observation of people and events. At one point the correspondent referred explicitly to his notebook and plans ‘of particulars jotted down upon the spot’ (emphasis added), which he reminded the reader he had before him as he wrote and which would ‘convey the justest impression of the Irish labourers as they exist in Merthyr’.Footnote 32 Such literary devices were designed to underscore the authenticity and, thus, authority of the observations.
The nature of the enquiry in Merthyr was structured by the logic of the journalist's social connections, from which it is possible to infer a little about his position in the class structure. Journalists occupied an ambiguous position on the social scale in the mid-nineteenth century,Footnote 33 yet in this particular case, the fact that the Morning Chronicle's reporter chose particular individuals to guide him in his enquiries is revealing. The trio he consulted for the report on the Irish were: the Anglican rector, the works' doctor and a Poor Law official. Religion is a significant cultural marker here. In spite of the strength of Protestant Nonconformity among the working-class Welsh and of Catholicism among the Irish, the correspondent made no attempt to draw on the familiarity of their ministers with the people. In fact, given the jaundiced view of the Welsh contained in the government's Education Reports of 1847, a view predominantly based on evidence from the Anglican clergy, it is remarkable that the Welsh emerged from the Morning Chronicle's reports in such a positive light. Once again, it is the act of contrast with the Irish that underscored the observer's perceptions of the Welsh and helped locate both groups in an overarching cultural taxonomy.
The use of ‘guides’ also conveyed the sense of adventure inherent in this emerging genre of social observation, with its attendant implication of visiting a ‘foreign country’ inhabited by the poor. The correspondent, as observer, occupies a mediating position in these reports, inviting the reader to join him in his journey of discovery. A sense of crossing a threshold from the public sphere of middle-class civilization to a more shadowy and less civilized world pervades the report. During his sojourn in Merthyr he visited, in the company of the surgeon to the Dowlais Iron Works, a total of three houses inhabited by Irish families. Descriptions of the interiors of these houses vary in detail but each helped to establish a contrast between the habitations of the Irish and Welsh, irrespective of their social status. According to this perspective, the houses of the Welsh (‘whatever were the wages of the owner’) were clean and well furnished, whereas the Irish had few material possessions and even fewer comforts to cushion the uncertainties of poverty.
A tangible sense of the correspondent's intrepid exploration is discernible in his description of a precarious venture into the dark loft of the house of an Irish family. The difference between public and domestic spaces was presented in terms of a contrast between light and darkness – a key characteristic of the melodramatic sensibility that dominated Victorian culture – and the darkness required both literal and figurative illumination:
One of the women ran out and soon returned with a candle, which she lit, and carried before us up a ladder, into the loft above. It is not without difficulty we squeezed ourselves through the narrow opening cut through the boards, but having done so we were fairly in the bedroom, the unoccupied space of which we pretty well filled. The room was formed simply of the slope of the roof; there was no window, but a tile had been displaced to admit a little light and air. The cobwebs hung in black films from the roof.Footnote 34
In this confined and gloomy space the newspaper's correspondent and the doctor found a man suffering from fever and an emaciated child ill with dysentery. A fortnight later, the correspondent discovered that the man and child were recovering but that another child had died from fever. Such information unquestionably added a frisson of danger to these journalistic explorations, impressing on readers the sacrifices that had to be endured to bring them this picture of an alien world in their midst. Most members of the middle classes had little knowledge of the domestic realities of lives lived in such circumstances, but the report represented this alien world through familiar literary tropes.
Commodity culture and ethnic identity
The mid-nineteenth century was a key moment in the emergence of a mass commodity culture, which would be theorized by Karl Marx. In his view, the commodity could not be considered as a material form of exchange alone, and the mass commodity culture that was built around it embodied broader social relations that derived in the last resort from the productive process.Footnote 35 Marx describes a process whereby relationships between individuals and groups take the form of relations between things. Attitudes to individuals are displaced on to commodities, in the process objectifying individuals and groups.
A concern with depicting an emerging commodity culture in this manner already permeated much contemporary fiction and its influence can be found in the Morning Chronicle report on Merthyr. Whereas the houses of the Welsh were ‘neatly and comfortably furnished’, displaying ‘a sufficiency – often a superfluity of furniture’, the houses of the Irish were the exact opposite.Footnote 36 Detailed inventories of the material contents of individual houses and allusions to the smells the correspondent experienced added to the immediacy of his observations. The Irish were easily found because they inhabited ‘the lowest and worst quarters of the town’ and were ‘compelled to segregate in their dwellings, for the Welsh will not reside among them’.Footnote 37 The Pen-y-darran district of the town, for example, contained an ‘Irish colony’ which exemplified the differences between the two ethnic groups. In the first Irish house the reporter entered, he found ‘no other furniture than a three-legged table, a small bench, two stools and a few utensils for cooking, such as saucepans, basins, plates and crockery’. Upstairs there were three beds of hay. The second dwelling belonging to an Irish family (‘a measured plan of this dwelling lies before me’) was to be found in the Pontystorehouse district and was similarly devoid of material goods. A string stretched before the fireplace displayed ‘a quantity of black woollen stockings, almost footless for want of repair’. The only downstairs room contained ‘a rickety three-legged table, a low bench and a log of wood. A cracked tea-pot, a blacking jar, and a broken lamp were on the chimney piece; and two tin pots on the fire.’ Upstairs there were two beds.Footnote 38
Of one Irish house, which the correspondent took to be representative of many other cases, a picture of the interior was assiduously and painstakingly built up:
The house consisted of two rooms, and was inhabited by two families and a lodger. The rent was 11s a month. In the upper room were three straw beds on the floor. The men and their wives severally occupied two of them, and the children the third. There was not a table in this house; the only furniture of the principal room was a cradle made of a bottle hamper, and three small benches. A teapot, a tin kettle, a can, two jugs, one candlestick, a basin, three pickle jars of green glass, and an ornament over the fireplace, in the shape of an illuminated card, announcing that ‘Markwich's Patent Epithems’ were to be had there, formed, with the exception of a brown pan, in which a kneeling woman was kneading dough upon the floor, the entire contents in the shape of furniture and utensils which this house contained.Footnote 39
By providing such a minute inventory (there are three pickle jars of green glass, not two or four of different colours), the journalist betrayed a concern with the material property of the Irish poor – their ‘things’. However, the description goes beyond a mere list of property and material circumstances by locating the Irish, as a group, in relation to a mass commodity culture.
The literary strategy used by the Morning Chronicle reporter is a variation on the kind of devices used by authors like Mary Gaskell in her industrial novel Mary Barton (1848). A concern with enumerating ‘things’ both in the novel and in investigative journalism reflects the fact that during this period a mass commodity culture was rapidly establishing itself in Britain and that commodities were produced by the industrial economy at unprecedented rates. The careful description of such commodities became a key feature of the Victorian novel from about the 1840s, and it is possible to draw parallels between the concerns of some novelists and the investigations of those involved in recording the life circumstances of ‘Labour and the Poor’.Footnote 40 Investigative journalism and the social novel shared some literary conventions that allowed both genres of writing to be understood in similar terms by the middle-class reading public for which they were written.
The emphasis on material possessions (or, in the case of the Irish, the relative lack of them) in the Morning Chronicle report was exemplified by the brief descriptions of the Welsh workers' homes. The best room in the houses of the most affluent workers contained ‘a fine mahogany eight-day clock, a showy mahogany chest of drawers, a set of mahogany chairs with solid seats, a glass-fronted cupboard for the display of china, glass, and silver spoons’. The extensive description of the contents of a particular cottage inhabited by Welsh workers included a variety of pieces of solid furniture, polished household accoutrements, framed prints, china and silver ornaments, books in the Welsh and the English languages, a spinning wheel and household plants.Footnote 41 From descriptions such as these it is clear that Welsh workers were believed to participate in a mass commodity culture, while the Irish were not; commodities were used as a means of demarcating lines of belonging and alienation and as a way of rooting social identities in material conditions.
This point is reinforced by juxtaposing the correspondent's depiction of domestic interiors with those of public spaces in his reports. His description of the buzz of activity that surrounded the town's market place on a Saturday night demonstrates this point clearly:
The shops of Merthyr are numerous, well furnished, and show all the bustle and activity of a thriving trade. The market-house, which is very capacious, may be termed a ‘bazaar of shops’. The scene from six to ten o'clock Saturday evening is one of the most extraordinary I have ever witnessed. In this interval what one might suppose the entire labouring population of Merthyr passes through its crowded halls. All are dressed in their Sunday clothing, clean, warm and comfortable. It is not only the field of supply, but evidently the promenade of the working classes.Footnote 42
As well as a wide variety of food stalls, the market house contained ‘stalls of every description of hardware, and other shop-goods. Hatters, drapers, shoemakers, tinmen, ironmongers, and even booksellers, here drive an active and thriving trade.’ Outside the hall, the plethora of booths, entertainments and ballad singers gave the scene a carnivalesque atmosphere. The market hall was the most inclusive urban institution in mid-nineteenth-century Merthyr, constituting a market, meeting place and a social spectacle that transcended occupational and religious divisions.
This description of the market house anticipated responses to the Great Exhibition in London of 1851. As Thomas Richards has written, ‘[t]he Exhibition rooted the commodity in the sense of being near the heart of things, of being caught up in the progress of people and institutions that dominated Victorian society’.Footnote 43 However, the reports of the Morning Chronicle demonstrate that the indivisibility of spectacle and commodity capitalism that Richards claims was a product of the Exhibition in fact preceded it; the Great Exhibition merely focused and amplified in one central event a trend that existed on a smaller scale in market houses in towns across Britain. Furthermore, his assertion, based on a particular reading of advertising images, that working people were not embraced by mass consumer culture until the end of the century is contradicted by the evidence supplied by the Morning Chronicle.Footnote 44 The belief that the accumulation and multiplication of commodities – of ‘things’ – encompassed the diversity of life is evident in these reports, just as it would be showcased for a domestic and international audience in the Great Exhibition. But it is a diversity that did not include the poor, who were spectators and not participants in it. In the case of Merthyr Tydfil, it was the Irish poor who were the group excluded from the mass commodity culture that was exemplified by shops ‘literally stuffed with goods’.Footnote 45 Although the Morning Chronicle's reporter was careful to mention the ‘jovial Irish’ among those who passed by the stalls of the market house on a Saturday night, his descriptions of their houses suggests that they were not among those buying goods. In the account of a poor Irish person's house quoted above, there is a particularly poignant reference to ‘an illuminated card, announcing that “Markwich's Patent Epithems” were to be had there’. The prominent display of this advertisement without possession of the goods themselves is an indicator of how the traces of a ubiquitous commodity culture extended into even a poor household, even though the inhabitants had no more than a tenuous relationship with that culture. The careful inventory of the few possessions of the Irish provided, in its very detail, an index of the material poverty of migrant life. It also implied a direct contrast with the respectable (native) working class, and thus served to reinforce a particular view of both groups.
While the report is ostensibly about ‘Labour and the Poor’, therefore, nationality and ethnicity are governing features of this particular report. Here the categories of ‘Irish’ and ‘Welsh’ are substituted for the terms ‘poor’ and ‘respectable working-class’. This is the key binary opposition of the text. We learn that the two groups do not mix, a statement that echoes one strand in the social commentary about urban Britain more generally from the 1830s, and in contradiction of the evidence of contacts between Irish Repealers and Chartists locally in 1848. Significantly, the idea of an Irish ghetto as a physically distinct district in the town is not fully elaborated here as it was in the case of Manchester through the writings of Dr J.P. Kay and Frederick Engels in the 1830s to 1840s. Establishing such an image would be difficult given the fragmented nature of Merthyr Tydfil's urban development, where the Irish clustered at the level of streets and courts rather than wards or districts.Footnote 46 Thus, although the reader is informed of the existence of a segregated ‘Irish colony’, it does not appear to share the same degree of spatial isolation that was imputed to the ‘Irish ghetto’ in Manchester and elsewhere. Furthermore, Irish manners supposedly contrasted with those of the respectable Welsh, as did the material condition of their domestic life.
Perhaps the most telling detail about the correspondent's contrast between the Irish and the Welsh is discernible in his observation about the difference between the children of the two groups. Welsh children were ‘clean and warmly clothed’, whereas Irish children were poorly protected against the elements:
In this quarter of the town I have seen Irish children of six or seven years of age rush to the doors of the houses, when the omnibus was passing, stark naked; though the frost was severe they seemed happy in their nudity, and equally to disregard decency and the sharpness of the cold.Footnote 47
The emphasis on the nudity of Irish children is designed to convey the ‘natural’ state of wildness of the Irish, their lack of civilization and an absence of cultivated manners. Once again it is the absence of ‘things’ (in this case clothes) that defines them. The central point of such observations is the contrast between the two ethnic groups; readers were reassured that such behaviour would not undermine the exemplary habits of the Welsh:
But numerous as are the Irish in the mining and manufacturing districts of South Wales, the morale of the Welsh, their cleanly habits, and their love of comforts, render them proof against the contagion of bad example, even were the antipathy which the Welsh bear towards the Irish of no account in this particular.Footnote 48
The anxiety that the Irish might undermine the ‘good’ habits of the native working class in Britain was a persistent theme in social commentary from the 1830s. It was the guiding principle of the government's Report on the Irish Poor in Great Britain of 1836 and it was a core concern of Thomas Carlyle's influential pamphlet, Chartism (1839). Carlyle argued vehemently that Irish migrants demoralized the English working class by undercutting wages and dragging down living standards.Footnote 49 We know that Angus Bethune Reach was influenced by Carlyle's writings,Footnote 50 so if he was the author of the reports on Merthyr his conclusions are significant. In contrast to social commentary in England at this time the Morning Chronicle reports on Merthyr rejected the view that the Irish demoralized Welsh workers. This point was underscored by delineating the different relationships of the two groups to a mass commodity culture: the supposed relationship of Welsh workers to their ‘things’ demonstrated that they had not been dragged down by the Irish ‘contagion’ of habits. Carlyle's pessimistic view of the impact of Irish migrants on the English working classes was not extended to Wales.
Conclusion
When compared with Mayhew's sophisticated (if problematic) investigations into the condition of the Irish in London, the reports on Merthyr Tydfil clearly present a more schematic picture of Irish life in the town. This might, in part, be explained by the dominance of the iron industry in the local economy and a tendency for attention to be concentrated less on the variety of occupations (as detailed in Mayhew's reports on London) than the impact of this single industry. More than this, the treatment of the Irish in Merthyr differs in important respects from the treatment accorded some of the other non-metropolitan areas of Britain in the ‘Labour and the Poor’ series. The Morning Chronicle's investigators in English towns like Bradford and Halifax dealt with the Irish in a sketchy and impressionistic fashion, whereas the reports on Leeds, Huddersfield, Oldham and Manchester were primarily concerned with finding out about working practices. The descriptions of poor domestic interiors in the accounts of these other towns emphasized poverty but did not demonstrate the same concern with commodities as signifiers of social identities.Footnote 51
By contrast, the Irish in Merthyr were an integral part of the broader analysis, forming the essential ‘Other’ to the native Welsh. The boundaries of respectable Protestant working-class identity were described in this article by opposition to the Catholic migrant Irish. By framing his reports in this way the journalist suppressed voices that might question the neat binary divide between the Irish and the Welsh. Defining the relative positions of the two groups in terms of their relationship to mass commodity culture was central to this process. Such literary devices had the effect not only of simplifying the reality of Irish migrant life and denying the diversity in its ranks, it also collapsed the notion that the Celts were a homogeneous racial grouping that pervaded Victorian culture.
The Morning Chronicle's reports on south Wales had their origin in a journalistic enterprise hatched in, and about, London, but they cannot be seen simply in terms of the intrusion of a metropolitan middle-class sensibility into a Welsh industrial town. The reports were published at a critical juncture in Merthyr Tydfil's development as an urban community and a number of individuals in the town's middle class – the rector, the Iron Works' surgeon and a poor law official – clearly had the opportunity to impress their views on the visitor. Consequently, it can be argued that the reports also reflect the concerns of a local middle-class elite that remained anxious about the prospect of the resurgence of Chartism but which had become much more preoccupied with solving the day-to-day social problems of crime and public health. Their response to these challenges was influenced to some extent by the debates about religion and morality generated by the controversy surrounding the Education Reports on Wales of 1847. In turn, the reception of the Morning Chronicle's reports about Merthyr by the inhabitants of that town would have been coloured in part by an existing discourse arising from the education controversy. When they read re-prints of the reports in the local newspaper, members of the local community were able to absorb the empirical information about social conditions in their town into their own cultural frameworks.
These years witnessed the development of a new urban politics and the beginning of the incorporation of the town's working-class population in constitutional modes of political activity. It was this transition that led to a willingness on their part to reject direct action in favour of constitutional reform. This process entailed the constitution of new political identities for the working class that stressed their respectability, sobriety and commitment to the ideals of domestic happiness. The latter was intimately connected with the cultivation of a congenial material life for working people. This process was supported by middle-class inhabitants of the town and reinforced by some outside observers – such as the Morning Chronicle's correspondent – who increasingly stressed the civilized behaviour of the Welsh and their attachment to an abundance of ‘things’ rather than the rebellious actions of the preceding decades.
Thus, the Morning Chronicle reports on Merthyr Tydfil demarcated the line between two periods in the town's history and embodied a new way of looking at the Welsh that eschewed the negative and fearful depictions of working-class life that had predominated in social commentary since the Merthyr Rising of 1831. The reports can be seen as a contribution to the re-imagining of how the Welsh were positioned in relation to the British state after the radicalism of the 1830s to 1840s, as well as fixing Irish identity as external to mainstream urban culture. The public health reports on British towns that were published following the Public Health Act of 1848 inscribed a similar opposition between the Irish and the native working class in the narrative of industrial towns.Footnote 52 During the middle decades of the century those Irish migrants who sought to embrace respectability and break away from the stereotypes in which social commentary tried to constrain them did so by embracing public practices that were key elements of local urban cultures, such as friendly society and temperance processions. This involved subjecting themselves to the public gaze in a way that indicated their membership of a mass commodity culture, through the respectable clothes they wore and the elaborate banners they carried.Footnote 53
Lastly, the Morning Chronicle reports were part of a process by which a tangible notion of the regional diversity of Britain during the industrial revolution was delineated for a middle-class audience. The presence on the same page or adjacent pages of the newspaper of reports from different towns and regions of the country effectively mapped the changing regional geography of industrial Britain, thus helping to make sense of industrialism and the forces unleashed by it. In the reports on each of the towns the Irish played an important role as outsiders. In this picture of Britishness-as-regional-diversity, the articles created a narrative of Irish difference that positioned members of this ethnic minority as outsiders at precisely the same time as complaints about the burden of the famine Irish on the poor rates of British ports and inland towns were ringing in the ears of politicians. It has been argued that because of its emphasis on possession of the right to settlement the Poor Law was essentially about belonging and identity;Footnote 54 during the famine years between 1845 and 1850 that equation of local rootedness with right of settlement was reaffirmed in the light of large-scale Irish migration to the western ports of Britain.Footnote 55 Thus, the Morning Chronicle articles were about interpreting a changing urban and industrial Britain to the (male) middle classes that had been enfranchised by the Reform Act of 1832. Their sense of Britishness excluded the urban Irish poor on the grounds of both social status and ethnicity, but allowed space for including the vision of a respectable Welsh urban working class; in this respect, the reports on ‘Labour and the Poor’ are symptomatic of broader trends in changing social and political attitudes.
