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In 1865, Ernest Jones returned to the field of political agitation in England. He joined the parliamentary reform campaign, initially under the auspices of the Manchester Manhood Suffrage League, and then from the autumn of 1866 as a paid lecturer of the Reform League. Jones took part in one of the defining moments of the reform struggle, debating the merits of democracy with the Scottish scholar J. S. Blackie over two nights in Edinburgh in January 1867, and along with Edmond Beales and John Bright, he became one of the most indefatigable and in-demand speakers in the months leading up to the passage of the Second Reform Bill in July 1867. Jones added the Fenian trials to his curriculum vitae, but they also dampened the Reform League’s enthusiasm for him.

This chapter discusses fenianism, a form of militant Irish American nationalism after the failed 1848 rebellion in Ireland. The first section of this chapter describes the attempts to combine north and south Ireland for the public end. This development owed everything to an unusual friendship between two rather different and very remarkable men, Charles Gavan Duffy and Dr. James McKnight. The second section looks at the rebirth of the Irish revolutionary tradition. Fenianism, as the new movement came to be called, linked the concerns and passions of patriotic young men in the homeland with the Irish-born of America and of England and Scotland. The third section examines the transition of fenianism from military elitism to popular politics. The fourth section reports on Isaac Butt, and the case for home rule.

In this chapter the conflicting and sometimes contradictory attitudes held by the London-based left towards the Irish and Jewish communities before the First World War are examined. The interactions between foreign emigres and a ‘native’ socialism are dissected, as are the depictions of Jews and Irish in the socialist narratives of ‘Merrie England’ and social Darwinism. Associations of minorities with sometimes violent forms of political activity such as anarchism, syndicalism and Fenianism are examined. The problems of defining Irish and Jewish eastenders in traditional class terms are analysed. The complex interplay of narratives of oppression and victimhood surrounding left-wing depictions of Jews and Catholics, including ‘anti-colonial’ antisemitism, are looked at. Finally, the attitudes of the trade union movement, Jewish and Irish involvement in the strikes of 1889, and how socialist groups and the Labour Party responded to the challenge of an anti-migrant radical right in the Edwardian period, are analysed.

This introductory chapter discusses the connection between bombs and books. It starts with a description of the bomb exhibits in the Black Museum during the 1890s. It examines the potential of writing about unbridled political and cultural chaos, which appealed to writers during the end of the nineteenth century. It then takes a look at the imperceptibility of the stateless anarchist, which is underlined by his/her trans-national character. The chapter also looks at some literary works that translated the shocks of anarchism and Fenianism into popular and modernist literary capital.

This chapter examines why race acquired such significance in Victorian culture in the 1860s. The conjunction of six major factors brought race to the fore in many arenas and genres, from novels and melodramas to histories and scientific treatises. These factors include debates over evolution, the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, the American Civil War, the 1865 Jamaica uprising, parliamentary reform, and Fenianism. On many occasions these and various other factors, such as the exploration of central Africa and the second Maori War, were interwoven in complex ways. Underlying them all seems to have been the unacknowledged desire to downplay class conflict and inequality or, when class was an unavoidable issue, to treat it in terms of race—in short, to translate the politics of class into biological necessity.

Stephen Hero is also a work of 1904–6. It produces a critique of the social formation that in some ways resembles that of Dubliners. It responds to the same historical conditions and identifies the same state of cultural arrest. But it does so on the basis of an exception to the formation, a young and radically dissident artist. Furthermore, Joyce also turns to the recent, radical past, the political legacy of a movement at its peak in the 1860s and 1870s, Fenianism. The chapter gives a detailed account of Fenian tradition, and how far Joyce identifies with but also extends its range, acuteness, and inventiveness. This is above all the case with the Fenians’ anticlericalism, their repudiation of the collusion of church and state in the continuing subjugation of Ireland. In effect, Stephen Hero rethinks certain Fenian positions as and in a modern Irish aesthetics.

A Portrait of the Artist is the culmination of the young Joyce's increasingly intricate thought. As Ireland during the period 1898–1914 was involved in an arduous passage to a limited freedom, so Joyce constructs a similarly difficult progress for Stephen Dedalus from 1882 to 1903 which offers an analogy for contemporary progress towards independence, reviews the historical circumstances preceding and producing it, and represents the struggle in distinctively aesthetic terms. Joyce holds in an ironic structure a range of forces within Irish culture in the period 1882–1903 (and beyond), from Parnellism to radical nationalism and Fenianism, ‘modern’ Catholicism, various forms of literary revivalism, Newmanism, the intellectual vectors involved in the Irish University Question, and many others. Stephen learns from but must move beyond these forces, in the interests of his own declaration of autonomy and a final identification of an ‘experience’ that will be ineluctably his own. Both declaration and identification are, at once, intimately personal and deeply political.

This chapter discusses the divergence, in the latter weeks of the rebellion, between the British public and private portrayals of the revolt. British public statements finally fully converged with the Zionist portrayal of the rebellion (the strong crimino-national claim). Yet, under the influence of military intelligence, British private assessments of the rebel movement proved subtler. They suggested that rather than being mere bandits, the rebels were something closer to "soldier-bandits," a sort of hybrid criminal-nationalist. The chapter discusses the discursive logic of this divergence, arguing that London's pro-nationalist pretensions in its Middle Eastern mandates hamstrung its capacity to characterize the rebellion as a large-scale outbreak of crime and forced it to pin the criminal charge upon a cabal of pseudo-national criminals (the Arab Higher Committee). The chapter goes on to detail a crisis within the British government over whether to declare martial law in Palestine and the logic of the eventual British decision against declaring martial law.

During his 1882 lecture tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde reminded audiences of the violence done to the Irish people and to Irish art by the powerful forces of imperialism. He acknowledged that conquest, colonisation and coercion had done much damage to a culture that continued to resist the superimposition of “alien English thought” on his country. Wilde also complained that the British empire was now fostering an artificial political consciousness that was “far removed from any love or knowledge of those wrongs of the people”.This chapter illustrates how he supported the insurgent peasantry that fought the Land Wars of the 1870s and 1880s and sympathised with workers in the United States and Britain.

This chapter considers the political career of one of the Land War's pivotal figures, Matthew Harris. Harris was one of the Fenians leaders who felt that an agrarian agitation could be made into a powerful revolutionary weapon outside of parliament, and that lay beyond the control of the constitutional politicians. Much effort is given to showing how the establishment of the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association in May 1876 helped to consolidate the alliance between the Fenians and small farmers that became a critical foundation of the early Land League. The opposition Harris encountered, for class and political reasons, is explored. The chapter also reflects on how revealing biography can be in the study of popular agrarian movements.

This chapter charts Yeats and Kipling’s abrupt return, at the age of sixteen, to their respective countries of origin (Yeats to art school in Dublin, and Kipling to a journalist’s career in India), showing how for both writers this return entailed the induction, transgression, and re-envisaging of collectives. Yeats’s early interests in occultism and Irish myth are considered alongside Kipling’s induction into Freemasonry and colonial society. It is shown how the importance of graphic art for both men was strengthened through reacquaintance with their long-absent fathers. The chapter explores in detail Yeats’s growing affinity with the Celtic cultural revival, and Kipling’s with the provincial community he found in Lahore.

The authorities assisted McGlynn to emigrate to Australia, where he returned to teaching. The four men in custody were released after serving twelve months. Most of the men arrested on McGlynn’s information reintegrated into society. The Ribbon Society remained in existence, albeit less involved in outrage, and young men emigrating to Pennsylvania’s coalfields moved easily into Hibernian lodges; there, men with ties to west Donegal were conspicuous in the Molly Maguire show trials of the late 1870s. Following the repeal of the Party Processions (Ireland) Act in 1872, local Ribbonmen, through marching bands and St Patrick’s Day parades, put themselves at the head of national opinion in their districts and accommodated themselves with the Church; the social divisions that had contributed to the rise and recalcitrance of the Mollies were now submerged in campaigns for land reform and Home Rule.

This chapter consider Ribbonism within the context of developing and competing Irish nationalisms in Ireland and in Britain from the early 1870s. In particular it explores two key themes that offer additional layers of detail to the complex and evolving nature of Irish nationalist allegiances during the period. First, it presents a case study examining intra-Catholic conflict in south Ulster between Ribbonmen and Fenians during the late 1860s and early 1870s; and secondly, it considers the origins of ‘public Ribbonism’ from around 1872 and particularly the rise to prominence of the ‘neo-Ribbon’ ancient Order of Hibernians in Ireland from the early 1890s.

This chapter focuses on the ‘Fenian trials’ of 1865–66. It challenges us to think beyond established ‘speeches from the dock’ narratives to consider the part played by the judiciary in the theatre of the court. While names such as Kickham, Luby, Rossa, and o’Leary will roll of the tongues of many today, fewer will recall a William Keogh, or a John David Fitzgerald, the two Catholic judges who presided over the special commission that tried the Fenian accused. There was much criticism at the time that the state had ‘packed the bench’, an accusation levelled with regularity throughout the nineteenth century. The essay gives due consideration to these claims. The appointments of Keogh and Fitzgerald were clearly political it suggests, and cites John Devoy’s assessment that all judges in Ireland were rewarded for political service rather than legal acumen. However, it concludes that the judges’ precise handling of the proceedings undermined attempts by the accused to challenge the legitimacy of the court and, ultimately, the Fenian trials show how perceptions of judicial partiality evolved over time.