Songs in a strange land - Ambiguities of identity amongst Irish migrants in mid-Victorian Manchester

The concepts of 'nation' and 'nationalism' are resilient and flexible social constructs which for the most part were formulated during the nineteenth century. One of their most characteristic features is the creation of an 'Other' against which a diverse population can rally and define their own identity. In the case of the English and British nation one historic Other was Roman Catholicism, especially as represented by the succession of European powers against which Great Britain waged a long series of wars from the sixteenth century onwards. Another was the Irish, who were constructed with a variety of vices to emphasise English and British superiority. Whilst Catholics were redefined into Britishness during the nineteenth century and some efforts were made to do the same for the Irish after 1800, the grudging way in which concessions were granted and the ambivalent and contradictory attitudes towards the place of the Irish within the British state stimulated them to begin the construction of a distinct alternative identity. Irishness in the nineteenth century was therefore a contested identity, and nowhere more so than amongst the Irish who had settled in British industrial cities during the early decades of the century. Material from a collection of broadside ballads published in Manchester in the 1860s and 1870s is used to show that during this formative period Irishness took a variety of forms, some of them highly ambiguous. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.