At the Margins of Victorian Britain

by Guest Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:31 pm

At the Margins of Victorian Britain
Politics, Immorality and Britishness in the Nineteenth Century

Lionel de Rothschild won the City of London seat in the 1847 general election. Because Rothschild was Jewish he was unable to swear the usual oath and thus take his seat. In 1858, after years of opposition and repeated re-election, a compromise finally allowed him into Parliament. Rainald Knightley, a Conservative opponent, complained that ‘a foreign nobleman came to that table as a representative of the City of London’. While Rothschild used an Austrian title (as Baron de Rothschild), he had been born in London and raised in England. Yet his opponents sought to deny his British identity.

Dennis Grube focuses on the British political elite’s efforts to define Britishness by identifying the ‘others’ against which British identity stood. Forms of collective identity often rely on this kind of exclusion. As the notion of Britishness developed in the 18th century, its chief antagonists were identified by religion. Catholics provided a foil against which the Protestant nation could define itself. Grube traces the evolution of definitions of the non-British ‘other’ through the 19th century, detecting a ‘shift from a concentration on the use of religion as a source of national unity to the use of morality as the stronger binding force’. A number of well-known incidents in Victorian England appear in a new light through the lens of defining Britishness and the ‘other’.

Grube argues that, as the non-British ‘others’ shifted from those defined by religion to groups identified as morally unacceptable, some former outsiders won access to Britishness. Jews, it was initially said, could never be truly British and for Catholics, Grube argues, ‘tolerance came slowly but relentlessly’. The atheist Charles Bradlaugh also faced exclusion from Parliament until 1885, though he was first elected in 1880. Catholics, Jews and atheists all moved into the British nation, as religious difference no longer defined the boundaries of Britishness.

By the end of the 19th century, Grube claims, moral judgments became the basis for identifying outsiders. The Irish met continued barriers to inclusion due to a perceived link to criminality and immorality. Coercion laws operated in Ireland on principles that were unacceptable within Britain, enforcing the identification of the Irish as ‘other’. British politicians, policing patterns and the press all propagated notions of Irish criminality that reinforced the exclusion of Irish immigrants from the nation. In addition, the late-century trial of Oscar Wilde and debates over Contagious Diseases Acts reveal the use of moral condemnation of homosexuals and prostitutes to define them as beyond the boundaries of the nation.

Grube highlights the arguments of politicians and the press in tracing the developing use of morality, rather than religion, as the basis for constructing British identity. However questions remain. How far did these establishment views affect popular perceptions of outsiders and of Britishness? Did most British men and women concur in the marginalisation of prostitutes or the gradual acceptance of Catholics, Jews and atheists into the nation? Despite slowly gaining access to Britishness, there remained wide and deep-seated hostility toward these groups.
These issues aside, the book provides an insightful reconsideration of well-known events and invites readers to consider the use of exclusion in the formation and reformation of British identity.

http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/05/margins-victorian-britain

Think a few people on this site would do well to read this book.