Punch and anti-Irish sentiment in nineteenth century Britain: blog post by Jack Wise.
Introduction
In January 2021 UCIL piloted a new module on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion that began with a historical overview of social reform and legal frameworks around EDI. Students enrolled on ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: Your Role in Shaping a Fairer World’ were asked to complete an assignment in which they found and evaluated a historical source. This was in a response to blog post created by the University of Manchester Special Collections called ‘Gender, Race and Disability: what do the archives tell us?
We are delighted to share samples of student work submitted for assessment on this module. We would like to thank Jack Wise for permission to include his interesting reflection on race and migration which begin with a cartoon in the Victorian satirical journal Punch in 1848
The British Lion and the Irish Monkey by Jack Wise
This 1848 cartoon depicts the Irish people as a monkey to portray them as inferior to the British, depicted by an imperial lion (Forker, 2012). While Britain’s lion wears a crown, the Irish monkey is depicted in a jester’s hat, ridiculing Irish defiance of Britain — this cartoon was published in the aftermath of the 1848 ‘Young Ireland Rebellion’. The monkey’s spear, compared with Britain’s naval ship, highlights Britain’s military superiority, while developing the image of the Irish as backwards. This idea was commonplace in Britain at the time; MP Benjamin Disraeli — who later became Prime Minister — described the Irish as a ‘wild, reckless…race’ in 1836 (McGrath, 2016). In addition, alongside Tenniel’s ‘Fenian Guy Fawkes’ (1867) and ‘The Irish Frankenstein’ (1882), this cartoon is a good example of the conflation of Irish ethnicity with black racial stereotypes (Forker, 2012). This was a tool often used to create a sense of otherness, entrenching ideas of race linked with inferiority, to justify oppression and negligence.
The Great Famine of 1845–49 in Ireland saw an estimated one million people die of starvation and disease, with as many as two million people emigrating, many of whom left for England (Mokyr, 2019). These immigrants suffered anti-Irish sentiment and were often viewed as inherently different and backwards. The politician and author Kay-Shuttleworth described Little Ireland, an area of slum housing in Manchester with a predominantly Irish population, as “inhabited by a class resembling savages”. Kay-Shuttleworth was later cited by Engels who described the residents of Little Ireland as “a horde of ragged women and children…as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps”, suggesting that this ‘race’ had “reached the lowest stage of humanity” in ‘The Condition of the Working Classes in England’ (1945).
Over 150 years on, and still ethnic minorities are not treated with empathy. Stereotyping and the distinct sense of otherness persists, and racial and xenophobic abuse is still commonplace. In 2015, the Daily Mail described immigrants as a ‘swarm on our streets’, while in 2019, Boris Johnson said he would prevent immigrants treating the UK ‘as their own country’, enforcing the idea of otherness (Insider, 2019). A 2018 survey by the University of Strathclyde found that 77% of Eastern European secondary school students were subject to xenophobia (Weale, 2019). Even the children or grandchildren of immigrants are not exempt from abuse, as can be seen in the ongoing abuse suffered by ethnic minority sportsmen.
In some cases, foreign people, including immigrants, are seen as fundamentally different, despite evidence that ethnicity and race are social constructs, rather than being biologically based. The treatment of Irish populations and notable immigrant populations since, such as the ‘Windrush generation’, provides a valuable lesson for immigration at present. To progress towards equality, the ideas of ‘difference’ and the remnants of ideas of ‘inferiority’ must be eradicated (Tharoor, 2017). The treatment of ethnic minorities in the past show that differential treatment or negligence is always a risk threatening populations while the concept of otherness persists.
