In this formidably well-researched monograph, Brian Jenkins approaches the history of Fenianism, the Irish republican revolutionary movement that came into being in 1858, first, as a problem of mid-Victorian British state security and only second as a subject to be analyzed in the context of the development of Irish nationalism. This means the analysis is situated within a present-day-orientated literature on terrorism rather than the recent historiography of Irish nationalism. Notably, the reader has to wait until page 328 for an obliquely dismissive reference to R. V. Comerford's “patriotism as pastime” thesis, the most influential and most contentious contribution to modern Fenian studies. Jenkins does not accept Comerford's view that Fenianism should be treated, first and foremost, as a form of mid-Victorian associationalism, with its violent activist cadre weakly related to the mainstream of the movement. Instead, his narrative makes the proposition that the minority of violent activists, classifiable according to present-day definitions as terrorists, had an extraordinary capacity for generating wider nationalist sympathy, making mainstream Irish nationalism, for a few brief years in the late 1860s, continuous with violent Fenianism. Although few might regret the decision to circumvent a still live but somewhat stale historiographical dispute (see Fearghal McGarry and James McConnel, eds., The Black Hand of Republicanism: Fenianism in Modern Ireland [Dublin, 2009]), it is not only undergraduate readers who might have found a less oblique positioning helpful.
Of first concern to the government was security, and Jenkins outlines the special reinforcements, military and civilian, the state periodically deployed to counter the perceived Fenian threat and secure the safety of British citizens. The politics of this are well drawn, although it is evident that more research is needed on the implementation of these measures, which might reveal a great deal about the capacities of the mid-Victorian state. The government's second concern, often forced to the top of the political agenda, were the dangers posed to political stability in Ireland by both the implementation of these security measures and the prosecution of Fenians of violent criminal acts. Liberal politicians were adamant that their behavior would not vindicate Irish claims that the British government was despotic and arbitrary. Jenkins makes it clear that this uprightness, as well as the state's capacity to defeat and punish the Fenians, was significantly shaped by the effect harsh treatment might have on nationalist public opinion in Ireland and liberal opinion in Britain. In general, broadly liberal outcomes regarding what was legitimate state action were the product of sustained political conflict within and between the two major parties, often against the background of popular dislike of the Irish. The strength of these liberal traditions is made evident in Jenkins's satisfyingly detailed accounts of the Manchester and Clerkenwell incidents, the consequent trials, and his comparative assessment of the penal conditions nationalist convicts faced. His conclusions are largely favorable to the judiciary and at odds with nineteenth-century nationalist opinion and popular nationalist memory. Prison conditions, by contrast, could be grim, particularly for those confined to a long period of solitary before hard labor, and often significantly worse than those inflicted on “political prisoners” in continental Europe. Britain's refusal to categorize any prisoners as “political” is considered, reflecting broader assumptions about the liberal character of the British state, which was thought to render any violent opposition unjustifiable and therefore criminal.
The mid-Victorians and Gladstone in particular, Jenkins suggests, upheld the state's liberal principles rather better than have their late Elizabethan successors (and, presumably, their U.S. counterparts), whether in the 1970s or more recently. Radical reform, however, proved less easy to instigate than due process was to maintain. Gladstone's freedom of action was circumscribed by a British polity predicated on landed and Anglican interests, and as the disastrous Irish University Bill of 1873 demonstrated, liberals never came to terms with the fact that to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas—the prime minister's much-vaunted aim—was to govern Ireland according to Catholic ideas.
The strength of this judicial liberalism, in part, reflected Gladstone's view that Fenianism's influence in the early 1870s was “trifling,” a view dismissed by Jenkins as “facile” (306), thus flying another historiographical kite. This judgment reflects the visceral tone of this determinedly narrative history, which recovers the verbal intensity of the political conflict shaping these years. The words of British politicians, newspaper editors, and the occasional military man or policeman are fully ventilated, while Fenian voices jostle for space with Irish Catholic churchmen, often in contact with senior British politicians, and what can loosely be termed as constitutional nationalists—it is hard to think of a recent monograph in nineteenth-century Irish history that so entertainingly conveys the vitality of its material. Although divided among themselves, all these nationalist groups opposed the British system of government in Ireland, and there was evidently much to justify the Gladstonian view that coercion served to strengthen nationalist unity. In particular, Jenkins demonstrates how the lower Catholic clergy tended to identify with popular political causes, which proved trying for a hierarchy attempting to manage public opinion. However, as much as the imprisoned Fenian attracted almost universal nationalist sympathy, Gladstone may have had a point about the Fenian at large. Jenkins draws too extensively on the Irishman, a newspaper of extreme views and relatively small circulation, and Gladstone's sanguine opinion might have seemed more plausible had the means of establishing Irish opinion been the editorial commentary provided by the more widely circulating Freeman's Journal (later the Pravda of the Home Rule movement).
This is a book to argue with; it is also a book enjoyably rich in detail and incident, painting a multifaceted picture of a society under strain. It provides what must be the richest account of Fenianism's heyday and is unambiguous about its wider political purpose. Any reader prone to romanticize the Fenians might note Jenkins's provoking suggestion that the Fenians and the Provisional Irish Republican Army were similar political phenomena, both temporarily diverting Irish nationalism from reformist pathways. More compelling, perhaps, is the example this picture of mid-Victorian Britain sets the liberal prosecutor of the so-called war on terror. Brian Jenkins's account of this past suggests the liberal's need for eternal vigilance in the present, focused not, in the first instance, on the risk from their enemies but from themselves. The Fenian Problem is rather brilliant and deserves a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic.
