Contents PROOF

PROOF Contents Notes on the Contributors vii Introduction 1 1 The Men of Property: Politics and the Languages of Class in the 1790s 7 Jim Smyth 2 William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833 21 Fintan Lane 3 The Rise of the Catholic Middle Class: O’Connellites in County Longford, 1820–50 48 Fergus O’Ferrall 4 ‘Carrying the War into the Walks of Commerce’: Exclusive Dealing and the Southern Protestant Middle Class during the Catholic Emancipation Campaign 65 Jacqueline Hill 5 The Decline of Duelling and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Ireland 89 James Kelly 6 ‘You’d be disgraced!’ Middle-Class Women and Respectability in Post-Famine Ireland 107 Maura Cronin 7 Middle-Class Attitudes to Poverty and Welfare in Post-Famine Ireland 130 Virginia Crossman 8 The Industrial Elite in Ireland from the Industrial Revolution to the First World War 148 Andy Bielenberg v October 9, 2009 17:15 MAC/PSMC Page-v 9780230_008267_01_prex PROOF vi Contents 9 ‘Another Class’? Women’s Higher Education in Ireland, 1870–1909 176 Senia Pašeta 10 Class, Nation, Gender and Self: Katharine Tynan and the Construction of Political Identities, 1880–1930 194 Aurelia L. S. Annat 11 Leadership, the Middle Classes and Ulster Unionism since the Late-Nineteenth Century 212 N. C. Fleming 12 William Martin Murphy, the Irish Independent and Middle-Class Politics, 1905–19 230 Patrick Maume 13 Planning and Philanthropy: Travellers and Class Boundaries in Urban Ireland, 1930–75 249 Aoife Bhreatnach 14 ‘The Stupid Propaganda of the Calamity Mongers’?: The Middle Class and Irish Politics, 1945–97 271 Diarmaid Ferriter Index 289 October 9, 2009 17:15 MAC/PSMC Page-vi 9780230_008267_01_prex PROOF 1 The Men of Property: Politics and the Languages of Class in the 1790s Jim Smyth Political rhetoric in Ireland in the 1790s – the sharply conflicting vocabularies of reform and disaffection, liberty, innovation. nation, constitution, Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic relief – was saturated by the assumptions, platitudes and invective, in short by the ‘languages’ of ‘class’. Correlations between social position and political affiliation are scarcely stable or clear-cut, but to contemporaries, as to later historians, it seemed apparent that there were indeed alignments between the two. Conservatives routinely understood challenges to the established order in the idiom of class, just as radicals and reformers often diagnosed society’s ills in terms of a corrupt, unjust and ‘monopolising’ aristocratic elite. And in Ireland, inevitably, class antagonisms overlapped and interpenetrated with religious divisions – Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. We must then attend to the languages of class when considering the conduct of politics in the late eighteenth century. Immediately, however, difficulties – interpretative, conceptual and linguistic – arise. How is ‘class’ determined? By wealth, land, property, birth, status or occupa- tion, or by some combination thereof? A glance at the written word in this period – in almost any conceivable genre, from printed ser- mons, to travel books, to political pamphlets – reveals the profusion, descriptive imprecision, blurred demarcations and sheer instability of the terminology of class. In addition to classes, these include ‘ranks’, ‘orders’, ‘sorts’, ‘degrees’, ‘stations’, ‘estates’ and ‘interests’. Each of these terms infers relationships, all more or less hierarchical, between socio- economic groups. Hierarchies might be simple binaries (rich and poor), tripartite (aristocracy, middling sort, lower orders) or more nuanced (nobility and gentry, commercial and professional, working poor and indigent). To the conservative mind, hierarchy, and thus inequality, was 7 October 9, 2009 17:33 MAC/PSMC Page-7 9780230_008267_03_cha01 PROOF 8 The Men of Property God-given, immutable and beneficent. Or so the theory ran, for in the age of the French Revolution, of public disorder and political upheaval, comforting metaphors of deference and subordination could no longer disguise nor suppress anxieties about social, even revolutionary, change. New languages Language change provides a strong index of social and cultural change and the erosion of traditional social and economic stratifications desta- bilised the nomenclature used to categorise them. In Penelope Cor- field’s formulation in late eighteenth-century Britain, ‘ “ranks” ...were “serried”, [and] “orders” ...were neatly aligned’, whereas ‘the mutual relationship of one “class” with another was conceptually much more fluid’.1 ‘Classes’, unlike traditional ‘ranks’, ‘orders’, ‘degrees’ and so on, were made not inherited; mutable social constructs not fixed and ‘natural’ social structures.2 Significantly, in these years the usage of ‘class’ was on the increase and with it a concomitant sense of the possibilities of mobility and change. Moreover, these languages packed a normative charge, saluting the upper echelons of society for their ‘gentility’ and denigrating the lower for their ‘vulgarity’.3 Poverty, deemed inescapable, was attributed to individual moral failings – sloth, drunkenness, igno- rance, lack of initiative and the like.4 From an opposing standpoint – articulated, for example, by the United Irishman Thomas Russell – the labouring poor were industrious, indispensable and exploited, aristo- crats idle and parasitic, and the commercial classes the true font of wealth and prosperity.5 Images of class pulsated with positive or pejo- rative connotations. In important ways, political conflict represented a conflict of representation. In the matter of ‘class’, Ireland’s 1790s boast a celebrated example of verbal ambiguity: Wolfe Tone’s reliance on ‘that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property’. The mean- ing of that seemingly straightforward proposition has long since been contested. Historians and political activists on the left have read the phrase literally: by ‘men of no property’, he meant what would later be called the working class.6 Tone’s modern biographer, on the other hand, contends that that simple interpretation ignores late eighteenth- century linguistic conventions. ‘Property’, she argues, referred ‘first and foremost [to] landed property’. Tone’s ‘men of no property’ were, in fact, ‘the middle classes’.7 Yet, if that is so, it would have surprised his ‘middle class’ contemporaries, particularly Catholics of that description. In 1793, an MP sympathetic to the Catholic cause noted that leading Catholic Committeemen, such as John Keogh (retired silk mercer) and October 9, 2009 17:33 MAC/PSMC Page-8 9780230_008267_03_cha01 PROOF Jim Smyth 9 Edward Byrne (wealthy sugar-baker), ‘hold all the Catholic property in their hands, and hav[e] the great stake in the country’. And, avoiding any possible confusion, he further states that ‘the much greater part of the landed property is in Protestant hands’.8 That same year, Tone himself refused to confine ‘property’ to land. Refuting accusations that the Catholic Committee were guilty of ‘exciting discontent, tumult and sedition’, he insisted that It is more peculiarly their interest to preserve peace and good order than that of any other body of men in the community. They have a large stake in the country, much of it vested in that kind of property which is most peculiarly exposed to danger from popular tumult. The General Committee would suffer more by one week’s disturbance than all the members of the two houses of parliament.9 Marianne Elliott may have been led astray by the word ‘respectable’. How, after all, could such a positive adjective be applied to the wretched lower orders? During the debates on the Act of Union in 1800, Tone’s old friend, the moderate Whig MP Peter Burrowes appeared to con- firm such class derision when he wondered how could it be that Lord Castlereagh, arch-enemy of Jacobinism, having got up pro-union peti- tions and resolutions by ‘frantic canvas’, ‘should dive into cellars and climb into garrets, to solicit plebian signatures against the ancient constitution of Ireland – that he should set on foot a poll of the populace of Ireland against its constitution – that he should blacken the columns of the government prints with the names of day labourers of the lowest description.’10 Pointed irony should not be discounted here. Certainly, radical propaganda of the 1790s is replete with altogether more affir- mative rhetoric. The United Irishmen asserted ‘The necessity of giving political value and station to the great majority of the people’. These types of formulation may be read as primarily political, as examples of the Whig and republican language of inclusive citizenship. However, they also had implicit social resonance, sometimes made explicit, as when the Dublin United Irishmen asked ‘Who makes the rich?’ and answered ‘The poor. What makes the shuttle fly, and the plough cleave the furrows? – The poor. Should the poor emigrate, what would become of you, proud, powerful, silly men?’ ‘The spirit of our laws is aristocratic’, they assert elsewhere, ‘and by no means calculated for the protection of the poor’, instancing the game laws, Stamp Act and criminal code.11 More obliquely, but unmistakably, radicals asserted the moral ‘station’ of the lower classes by subverting and co-opting Edmund Burke’s notorious denigration of them as ‘the swinish multitude’. Thomas October 9, 2009 17:33 MAC/PSMC Page-9 9780230_008267_03_cha01 PROOF 10 The Men of Property Spence’s Pigs Meat: Lessons for the Swinish Multitude is only the best known of the many English publications which redeployed Burke’s epi- thet ironically. In Ireland, William Drennan used the phrase in that manner in a 1795 pamphlet, while the rebel army which marched on Antrim town on 7 June 1798 struck up a song, ‘The Swinish Multitude’.12 To be sure, middle-class radical attitudes towards ‘the people’ could be patronising and ambivalent. For instance, prominent United Irish- men opposed the proto-trade unionism of workers ‘combinations’.13 As a number of them were themselves employers, especially in the tex- tile trades, that is hardly surprising. Yet, if they embraced the term ‘democrat’, and assumed ‘natural’ leadership of their social ‘inferiors’, as occupants of the middle rank they faced two ways.

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