Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland is a collection of essays that examine relatively neglected aspects of Irish political history. The book fills an important niche in the scholarship on the nineteenth century and is enormously successful in generating a rich sense of the political landscape of the time.

While focusing on widely different topics, the thirteen chapters coalesce around a series of themes. First, they each deal with political power in Victorian Ireland, its sources, applications, and constructions, from royal and noble power-brokering to local government and urban policing. For example, Roland Quinault examines the actions and attitudes of seven of Victoria's prime ministers on Irish issues; Diane Urquhart analyzes the influence of two female Anglo-Irish figures in high society on senior British politicians; Jane Jordan considers Katherine O’Shea's role as an interlocutor between Parnell and Gladstone, providing a mechanism for private communication between the Irish Parliamentary Party and the government that shaped the actions of each; and N. C. Fleming traces the influence of the landed elite in the emergence and institutionalization of Ulster unionism. Taken together, these chapters create a broad and textured portrayal of how things got done in Irish politics during Victoria's reign.

Second, each chapter contends with the common narrative of nineteenth-century Irish politics that oversimplifies history as a preordained contest between Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and unionists, Irish and English. Each offers insight into the multiple tensions present in the nineteenth century and the process through which identities were shaped, issues framed, cleavages constructed, and nations “imagined.” For example, Christine Kinealy's chapter on Queen Victoria explains how her image became that of “Famine Queen” over the course of her multiple trips to Ireland. Gary Peatling, in studying the liberal press in Ulster, describes the devotional and political tensions within the Ulster Protestant community, including those over how to respond to critics of the British regime, and details the collapse of the radical component of the Presbyterian community in the late nineteenth century. Michael Huggins and David Dwan, in separate chapters on the fluidity of the relationships between the Irish Chartists, utilitarians, and the Repeal and the Young Ireland movements, evaluate the confluence and conflict of ideas and personalities in these organizations. Huggins summarizes the point that in the context of the acute and ongoing crises in Ireland over this period, “all loyalties and identities were mutable and contingent” (107). Together, these essays work to explain the incongruities of Protestant leaders in Irish nationalism such as Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell and the various political conversions of figures such as Robert Peel, William Gladstone, and Edward Carson.

Third, each of the contributions speaks to the magnitude of the problem of Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. Whereas hindsight generates the impression that an independent Ireland was both right and inevitable, these chapters collectively demonstrate how difficult it was to chart a path for reform in Ireland, in part because the constitutional status of Ireland was conflated with problems of land reform; (dis)establishment; economic collapse and the Famine; the geographic concentrations of crises, such as in the west during the Famine and in Ulster during the Home Rule crises; internal divisions within the multiple groups vying for influence; and the problem of national security for the United Kingdom. In addition, British reform in Ireland was dependent on forces opposed to it, in the House of Lords and even more broadly in the British electorate. Roland Quinault, quoting Charles Greville, characterized the problem of finding a solution as bridging the gap between “what the people of England could be brought to consent [to] and what the people of Ireland would be content to receive” (68).

These essays also make clear that Irish subordination within the British Empire was not simply a denial of democracy in the sense of the British oppressing the will of the majority of the Irish. Instead, the principles of democracy were used to support arguments in many different directions. As Quinault points out, British prime ministers such as Gladstone and Salisbury feared the oppression of the unionist minority by the nationalist majority were the Irish permitted to rule themselves, and Salisbury framed his objections to Irish Home Rule in terms of the suppression of the democratic will of the people of the United Kingdom to the will of one of its contingent parts. Virginia Crossman explains that it was also not clear that democracy at the local level was working for the Irish, as even after much of the corruption, partiality, and abuse within local administrations had declined, the Irish lacked consensus over what the criteria for good local government were.

What these essays do especially well is push the story of Irish politics in this period beyond the traditional understanding. They each seize upon either an unexplored aspect of Victorian politics or a controversial one. Nearly all identify holes in the extant scholarship, and many use original sources (personal papers, newspaper reports, and organizational documents) to offer fresh insight into the political dynamics of the time.

Ireland was extremely important to British politics throughout the nineteenth century. Considerations of Irish political, economic, and social dynamics precipitated the extension of the suffrage across the United Kingdom multiple times over the century; the rise and fall of governments in London; disestablishment; and, eventually, by 1911, constitutional reform in the narrowing of the right to rule of the House of Lords. Ireland was also the test case for experiments in public policies, including poor relief laws, modern policing, and various economic development policies. Though the constellations of interests were unique to Ireland, the significance of Ireland to British politics makes this book an invaluable read for scholars of both histories.