IN HIS 1839 PAMPHLET, “Chartism,” Thomas Carlyle assesses current class conflict and working-class radicalism in Britain and declares a national crisis. He articulates this crisis as urgent query facing the English nation: the “condition of England question.” To represent and to explore this national emergency, Carlyle imagines early Victorian England as a diseased national body.¹

For Carlyle, Chartist politics and other manifestations of working-class discontent are outward signs of an illness ravaging England – “symptoms on the surface [which you abolish] to no purpose, if the disease is left untouched” (120). Carlyle then qualifies this metaphoric pathologization of working-class insurgency by making a critical distinction between the “chimera” and the “essence” of the disease of unrest (119), between its legible symptoms and the deeper causes that they signify. By taking the “essence” of Chartism as his subject, Carlyle insists that his intervention is not another inadequate symptomology. Instead, he stages “Chartism” as an attempt to provide an epidemiology, a comprehensive study of the causes, transmission, and potential control of Chartist agitation; according to Carlyle, only such epidemiological attention to the origins of the disease will make prophylactic measures and a socioeconomic cure possible.

It is not surprising that Carlyle relies on biomedical discourse to represent the national significance of Chartist agitation. He is drawing on a long history of representations of England and Britain as a body politic as well as a discourse of the ‘body social’ emerging in early Victorian Britain.²

His metaphor of the infected national body also echoes the rhetoric of middle- and upper-class panic about literal contagion in the 1830s, such as cholera and typhus, epidemics which were seen to emanate from urban working-class neighborhoods in urban centers and to contaminate Britain as a whole (Arac 29–30). In addition, Carlyle redeploys the figuration of revolutionary politics as a disease, a metaphor common in British conservative reaction to the French Revolution several decades earlier.

Many literary critics who engage in readings of “Chartism” emphasize these important historical and discursive contexts as well as the contemporaneous growth of working-class agitation that seemed to signify both the impending eruption of violent class conflict and the impotency of the British state to prevent it.³

Most then argue persuasively that Carlyle diagnoses the following conditions as constituting the “essence” of Chartism – ruling-class failure to govern properly; the dominance of a laissez-faire ideology in social and economic policy in Britain; the erosion of religious, moral, and political authority within the nation; and industrialization's corruption of what Carlyle saw as an effective social order.⁴ Carlyle certainly identifies these conditions as crucial elements that produce Chartist agitation. At a glance though, we find that these historical conditions are all domestic issues, and thereby organic or internal to the nation. Yet a careful reading of Carlyle's metaphor of the diseased national body reveals the unmistakable suggestion of infection by foreign contagion; it implies that England's body has suffered exposure to a contaminant which is not intrinsic to the nation's composition. What alien infectious agent has penetrated England's boundaries and, through pollution of the working-class, serves as the catalyst for the disease of proletarian disaffection?

According to Carlyle, the source of this infection is Ireland. He names Irish immigration to Britain as “the sorest evil this country has to strive with” (138), the means of transmission of an infection which adulterates the body politic with working-class unrest and revolutionary potential.⁵

Carlyle figures the Irish immigrant as “the ready made nucleus of degradation and disorder” (139) who carries to Britain the misery of Irish poverty and a “National character [that] is degraded” (137). Carlyle writes, “we have quarantines against pestilence; but there is no pestilence like that; and against it what quarantine is possible?” (139). At the close of his chapter on the English working class, he states even more boldly, “Ireland is in chronic atrophy these five centuries; the disease of nobler England, identified now with that of Ireland, becomes acute, has crises, and will be cured or kill” (144). Therefore, by tracing briefly the discourse of disease in Carlyle's pamphlet, we see the central place of Irish immigrants in his analysis of working class radicalism in Britain. The immigration of Irish subjects introduces a “pestilence” which takes hold of a national body already weakened by forms of domestic disorder.

Thus, building on Chris Vanden Bossche's assertion that “Carlyle [considered] the condition of Ireland a key to understanding the condition of England” (127), I would argue that, for Carlyle, the national crisis facing Britain is a crisis of Britain's relation to Ireland.⁶

Carlyle's influential formulation of the “condition of England question” demonstrates clearly how early Victorian constructions of the British working-class are formed in relation to Irish racial stereotypes, particularly concerning the violence imagined as inherent in Irish subjects; ideas about England's condition are also profoundly informed by fear of the cultural and racial mixing of the “Saxon” and the “Celt.”⁷ Conservative panic concerning the possibility of revolution in England is inseparable from rising anxiety about the integrity of Englishness and Britishness in the face of the “counter-colonization” of the imperial nation through the first large-scale immigration of colonial subjects. In other words, the crisis that Carlyle identifies in his apocalyptic assertion of national disintegration is as much a crisis of colonialism, immigration, and national identity as it is a crisis of class relations.

In 1845, just six years after the publication of Carlyle's pamphlet, Friedrich Engels employed “Chartism” as the primary source of information on Irish immigrants in his foundational, proto-Marxist study, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels' revolutionary politics concerning English proletarian radicalism differs greatly from Carlyle's prophylactic approach to Chartism. But, Engels's chapter, “Irish Immigration,” shows a surprising point of agreement between the two on the critical role of Irish immigration in producing discontent among British workers. These immigrants bring about a flooding of the labor market, a lowered standard of living, and the introduction of a tendency towards violence against the British state. Thus, Engels shares with Carlyle an analysis of Irish immigrants as a contaminant of sorts – the source of the economic, cultural, and racial degeneration that has in turn engendered class consciousness and working class radical politics. Like Carlyle, Engels attributes this degeneration to the racial identity of the Irish: their biological “uncivilized” temperament and an innate predisposition “to kill their oppressors” (309). However, in order to press this understanding of Irish immigration into the service of his dialectical analysis of revolution in England, Engels must reframe this racialism outside of the anti-immigrant politics of Carlyle. He encourages miscegenation between the calm, rational English worker and the violent, insurrectionary Irish worker. Irish racial temperament must be transmitted to the English proletariat not just through “daily contact” but by means of “intermarriage” (139). Engels's project takes on an eugenic dimension as he imagines a way to transfuse “Irishness” into the English nation and thereby to harness Irish violence in service of revolutionary politics.

By examining these two important texts by Carlyle and Engels, this essay argues that, in the early Victorian period, constructions of British working class identity and radical politics were inextricable from discourses of Irish racial difference and Irish immigration. By juxtaposing the work of these two intellectuals, it is not my intention to ignore or to render insignificant the very important political differences between them. Instead, their incompatible politics makes their similarities all the more striking. Reading Carlyle's pamphlet and Engels's study comparatively provides an opportunity to see how both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic analyses of class conflict and of revolutionary possibility were inseparable from questions of imperial security, race, immigration, and national integrity.

These texts must be read as emerging out of a particular historical crisis that began with the Act of Union of 1800 and then intensified after Catholic Emancipation in 1829. The Act of Union refashioned the British nation, creating the precarious new entity, “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” through the legal and juridical absorption of a colony into the imperial nation. Even the grammar of this legislative creation reflects the ambivalence with which it was riven from the beginning. The name, “United Kingdom,” reflects a primary insistence that its various parts are solidly unified. However, Ireland remains attached by the conjunction “and,” a grammatical reminder of the limits of incorporation and the specter of a continued recalcitrance which no union could obscure. Such a close reading makes apparent the ways in which Union placed the Irish in a liminal and contradictory position. They were national subjects incorporated into the nation-state through parliamentary and economic structures and given the title of citizens, but they remained a colonized and alien population, denied certain fundamental rights of citizenship, and continued to be constructed as culturally, religiously and racially other. This position rendered Irish masses within the newly created U.K. indecipherable in relation to questions of national belonging, making them an internal yet persistently foreign population just as Carlyle's biological language describes them.

The Act of Union also created the contradiction of quarantine which Carlyle's biomedical and sanitary discourse implies. Union was ratified in large part as a legislative response to “Irish receptivity to French ideas” (Foster 282), to anti-colonial insurgency that had long been seen as a dangerous manifestation of the anarchy inherent to the unruly Irish (Hickman 72–89). However, while the creation of the United Kingdom extended the suppressive reach of the British state to Ireland more directly, Irish violence and revolutionary potential were now in a sense absorbed into the British nation. While state domination became easier, any quarantine of insurrection within the borders of Ireland became difficult if not impossible. From the beginning, the implications of union as a form of colonial domination left British politicians and thinkers grappling with serious questions: how should the Irish be brought into the nation? should they or could they assimilate? how could Irish difference be accommodated within the U.K. without producing violent and degenerative effects? These questions only intensified after the ratification of the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1828, legislation which began to dismantle some of the legal disabilities to which Catholics residing with the U.K. were subject. As state discrimination against the Irish on the basis of religion began to lose some of its force, racial and cultural constructions of difference began to come to the fore as primary modes of articulating the enduring separateness of Ireland from the United Kingdom.⁸

Hence, in the wake of Union and Catholic Emancipation, the kind of attention to these questions exhibited by Carlyle and Engels is far from anomalous, and during the 1830s, political concerns about Ireland only intensified due to increasing Irish immigration to Britain. Even before a flood of immigrants arrived in Britain during the great famines of the mid 1840s, what Kerby Miller calls “the prefamine exodus”(1) began as a steady stream of Irish entered Britain as permanent emigrants or seasonal migrants looking for work. By 1841, just two years after the publication of “Chartism,” the British census recorded more than 415,000 Irish in England and Scotland, a figure which did not include seasonal laborers and the children of earlier emigrants. This Irish presence provoked widely disseminated xenophobic discourses on the influence of these immigrants, particularly their effect on the English working-class and their politicization. This backlash was exacerbated by the appearance of a demand for Repeal of the Act of Union on many Chartist platforms, some alliances between Irish nationalists and working class radicals, and the seemingly prominent role of the Irish in the most radical Chartist politics which had begun to advocate physical force as a legitimate tactic of political struggle (D. Thompson 103–33).

When examining the historical context of early Victorian anti-Irish discourse, we must also consider one other aspect of this historical conjuncture. Stuart Hall has defined modern crisis as periods in which the capitalist means of production cannot reproduce itself without significant transformation (Hard Road 98). Hall's definition allows us to understand Irish immigration to Britain during the 1830s in a more complex frame. The national integrity of Britain was not only threatened by a form of colonial domination that ruptured and reorganized the nation's boundaries, but by the capitalist mode of production's ever increasing demand for surplus labor. The continued expansion of British industrialization demanded and attracted a reserve army of labor from the feudalized periphery of the newly created United Kingdom (Hobsbawm 309–12). Therefore, post-Union economic decline in Ireland created the material conditions necessary to allow continued capitalist development in Britain. Not only did the newest form of colonial control create a dissolution of national boundaries that threatened the nation's stability and self-conception, but the capitalist mode of production required this same crossing and confounding of boundaries in the form of the immigration and migration of laborers. Stuart Hall has described this process as a “tension between the tendency of capitalism to develop the nation-state and national cultures and its transnational imperatives [–] a contradiction at the heart of modernity” (“Mongrel Selves” 6). Applying Hall's formulation to the Act of Union and subsequent immigration, it becomes clear that for us, as for Carlyle, Irish immigration during the 1830s and 40s serves as the lens that brings into focus an extended national crisis precipitated by the conjoined projects of colonialism and capitalist expansion. The English working class became the doubly vulnerable site of permeability and instability; Union dismantled the national boundaries that separated the British proletariat and Irish subjects, while capitalist production demanded that the British working class absorb surplus population, perceived as racially other and inherently insurrectionary, into the nation as necessary labor-power.

This essay calls attention to the way that, in early nineteenth-century conservative and progressive interventions regarding the working class, the discourse of race is required to identify and analyze the complex crisis I have described and to resolve it accordingly. I am not suggesting that the discourse of Irish racial difference appears during the early Victorian period. Scholars such as Luke Gibbons and Mary Hickman have provided compelling accounts of the emergence of anti-Irish racism long before the nineteenth century. Rather, I want to identify a transformation of a long-standing discourse of Irish racial difference, a transformation that takes place during the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Historians Hazel Waters and Kevin Whelan have presented commanding arguments that anti-Irish racism, while having powerful antecedents for centuries, crystallized in its most explicit form during the Great Famine. However, Carlyle's “Chartism” shows that this crystallization after 1846 occurs as the culmination of a process begun in the previous decade. In the case of both Carlyle and Engels, pre-famine racialist discourse provides a way to think through the contradictions of Union, the effects of Irish immigration on the working class, the transformations effected by the development of the capitalist mode of production, and the problematic of revolutionary possibility in Britain. This essay investigates this shift in the ideological work that the discourse of race performs in early Victorian Britain. Race provides a way to represent what is perceived as the critical role of Irish subjects in the inextricable diseases of industrialization and discontent. For Carlyle and Engels, a racialized conception of Irishness enables them to imagine two radically different cures for the chronic affliction of class conflict in Britain.

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AFTER DEFINING the “condition of England question” using the vivid and resonant image of the diseased national body, Carlyle rejects the validity of both statistical analysis and legislative remedies in addressing the current national crisis. According to Carlyle, these methods of sociopolitical inquiry ignore the factor most relevant to the problem of discontent among the laboring classes – Ireland, the source of immigrants who overwhelm and destabilize the British labor market. Carlyle declares:

This hyperbolic passage insists upon the momentous global importance of the historical phenomenon of Irish economic decline. The enormously significant “fact” of Ireland's condition is “pregnant” in relation to the “condition of England question” this use of reproductive language throws into relief the Malthusian underpinnings of Carlyle's analysis. The evocation of overpopulation and of millions of starving, indolent bodies across the Irish Sea inaugurates Carlyle's apocalyptic vision of the impending destruction of the English nation.

At first, Carlyle seems to insist upon the culpability of England for Irish poverty, admonishing: “[a] government and guidance of white European men which has issued in perennial hunger of potatoes to the third man extant, – ought to drop a veil over its face, and walk out of court under conduct of proper officers; saying no word; expecting now of a surety sentence either to change or die” (136). This legal-juridical image represents the English government of Ireland as criminal and implies the guilt of England for colonial rule that has resulted in Irish starvation; the “government and guidance of white European men” is not supposed to result in such circumstances. Carlyle eventually states:

This bald statement of responsibility might express an explicitly anti-colonial politics. In fact, some readers, including the founding members of the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s, took this passage as a radical statement of Carlyle's sympathy with Ireland's nationalist movements.⁹

However, John B. Lamb has convincingly argued that Carlyle's “Chartism” ultimately presents an “imperialist dream as the cure for the disease of economic and political distress” as “the gospel of work [becomes] the gospel of empire” (143–45) Hence, the critique of British rule in Ireland is only a reproach for the kind of colonial domination and administration to which Britain's neighbor has been subject, not a wholesale rejection of Britain's right and duty to colonize.

Thus, this unexpected admission of England's accountability is quickly repressed, subordinated to the Anglocentrism of Carlyle's politics and to the racialist perspective on Ireland that his imperialist vision requires. The history of Ireland's misrule must be invoked in order to diagnose Chartism's “essence,” but only its current impact on England is important to Carlyle's project. He quickly redirects his readers' attention:

In this important passage, Carlyle begins to lay out his construction of “Irish National Character.” He argues that the injustices of colonial history are only relevant in that they have caused Irish identity to become “degraded, disordered,” to undergo a process of degeneration which has become self-perpetuating. As a result, the Irish are now subject to the kind of self-perpetuating process described by Daniel Pick in his comprehensive study of European ideas of degeneration: “degeneration slides over from a description of a disease or degradation as such, to become a kind of self-reproducing pathological process – a causal agent in the blood, the body, and the race – which engendered a cycle of historical and social decline perhaps finally beyond social determination” (22). The material of Irishness itself is deeply altered; the material conditions of colonialism have been reified within Irish bodies, effecting a systemic, immutable change in national identity.

Thus, Carlyle turns his attention to the painstaking construction of a vision of “Irish National Character.” He contends that the dominant, essential qualities of Irish national identity are criminality, treachery, anarchy, and dishonesty, a total alienation from “the truth.” These characteristics combine to form a general state of barbarism,¹⁰

one not only alien to Englishness but a terrifying, irreversible inversion of British civilization. “Savagery” has taken a biological hold in each Irish body, encoded and carried in blood, until the disorder “circulates … through every vein of [the people].” Once this internalization and transmutation are complete, the Irish are emptied of all human content and become a “no-thing,” a kind of living vacuum devoid of civilization. In relation to Britain, each Irish subject is a “Sanspotatoe,” a lack who looks to consume that which has been denied him or her. Regardless of the historical processes that Carlyle acknowledges, the exigencies of the contemporary situation demand ruthless self-preservation on the part of the British people: “Ireland will be burnt into a black unpeopled field of ashes rather than this should last” (137) and “[t]he time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated” (139).

Carlyle justifies this terrifying discourse of “extermination” (written in eerie anticipation of the onset of catastrophic famine in Ireland just six years later) by shifting his focus entirely onto the effects of Irish immigration on Britain. In what I am calling the “wild Milesian” passage, which is also the passage that Engels cites at length, he writes:

In this lengthy narrative, every “third Sanspotatoe” enters the British nation easily due to the proximity of Ireland and the low cost of transportation. Such immigrants “darken all our towns.” The metaphor of “darkening” represents the process of national degeneration in Britain that the Irish presence generates. The descriptive, “darkening,” also literally implies the unsanitary living habits that Carlyle associates with the Irish – the “filth” of Irish working-class ghettoes that sully English and Scottish cities. This metaphor also offers a figurative representation of the cultural and racial pollution of British civilization. In addition, Carlyle identifies the sites of contamination as “our” urban centers, employing the first person plural to consolidate British national belonging in the face of an Irish invasion.

Arrival in Britain transforms the “third Sanspotatoe” into the “wild Milesian,” the synechdochal figure of the Irishness transfused into Britain. Carlyle imagines this “Milesian” as an Irish pauper who, while begging on the roadside, is whipped by an English coachman – a vignette which embodies Carlyle's vision of the relations between Ireland and Britain. The image places the English figure physically above the roadside beggar and also seated upon a coach, a signifier of British technological superiority, of the coachman's stable place within the nation's class structure, and of his skilled labor. The coachman must fend off the Irish pest beneath him with physical violence; thus, Irish immigrants are immediately associated with economic parasitism that demands violent suppression. The Milesian is described as willing to perform unskilled labor for wages below the British national standard; his presence transforms the labor contract. Clearly, for Carlyle, the first and most striking effect of the presence of the Milesian is the degeneration of the national economy produced by falling wages, increased unemployment, and a growth in the number of the working class who, in order to survive, either enter state-sponsored workhouses or become indigent.

In addition, the Milesian's “savagery” is composed of other attributes which typify Irishness – irrationality, “false ingenuity,” and mockery of English civilization; these elements of Irish national character are expressed through Irish culture. Carlyle redeploys stock images of Irish rags and filth, reinforcing a long-standing stereotype that the Irish had a much lower standard of personal and domestic hygiene than the British. Such unsanitary conditions are synonymous with supposed Irish superstition and Catholic idolatry, as the Milesian changes his suit of tatters only “in festivals and the hightides of the calendar”; while Carlyle writes little of Irish Catholicism in “Chartism,” this image makes clear the way that Roman Catholic religious practices serve as evidence of Irish inferiority.¹¹

Bodily degradation is mirrored by the “barbaric” living conditions of Irish domestic space, a standard of living akin to the animality of “pighutch[es] or doghutch[es]”; even the simplicity of the food eaten in the households of a “root-devouring” (136) people who need “only salt for condiment” becomes a stigmatizing signifier of savagery. These aspects of Carlyle's “Milesian” reinforce Anne McClintock's argument that “English racism also drew deeply on the notion of the domestic barbarism of the Irish as a marker of racial difference,” leading to the formation of an “iconography of domestic degeneracy” (53).

Carlyle's imagining of the “wild Milesian” also associates the Irish with criminality, particularly forms of the “drunken violence” (139) that he calls to his readers' attention throughout “Chartism.” Carlyle makes use of a tradition that imagines the “natural” Irish temperament as unstable, violent, and unpredictable.¹²

In an 1834 travel narrative published several years before “Chartism,” Henry Inglis, a close friend and correspondent of Carlyle's throughout the 1830s, wrote that for the English, “[t]he very name [Ireland] forces to our recollection images of shillelaghs, and broken heads, and turbulence of every kind” (Lebow 53). Here Inglis claims that, in British popular imaginary, Ireland is synonymous with violence in many forms. This statement also exemplifies the way in which resistance to colonial domination was depoliticized and translated into “irrational” violence produced by the essential instability and criminality of the Irish. Through the prism of racialization, this violence is abstracted into general “turbulence” and posited as the expression of an inherent insanity: “emotional instability, mental disequilibrium, or dualistic temperament”(Curtis 51). In other words, in this construction of the “wild Milesian,” Carlyle engages in both the racialization of violence and what Michel Foucault calls “the psychiatrization of criminal danger”(128). He then suggests that this national predisposition to criminal insanity is exacerbated by uncontrolled consumption of alcohol, the “liquid Madness” of the Irish (144).

The Milesian passage suggests two primary markers of difference that express Irish national character in legible form and that allow for the identification of Irish immigrants. These markers override the absence of what Franz Fanon called an “epidermal schema” of race, the absence of which might allow the Irish to infiltrate England and to circulate without detection. First, Carlyle identifies the “partially intelligible dialect of English” spoken by the Irish as an emblem of their barbarism. Language, accent, and a supposed inability to master the English language inscribe Irish bodies circulating throughout Britain with an audible difference that ensures their detectability and that therefore differentiates them from the British working class.¹³

These linguistic markers also serve as signs of the impossibility of Irish assimilation to English culture, the failure of a long-standing project of cultural imperialism.

Carlyle supplements this linguistic difference with an insistence on visual, corporeal markers of Irishness. Halfway through the Milesian passage, he shifts his narrative into the second person; readers are exhorted to scrutinize proletarian faces and to discover in them the imagined signs of mass Irish immigration. He informs his reader that “wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways” (my emphases, 138). Irish difference operates in a visual economy; physiognomy “salutes” those who witness it, making the identification of Irishness possible. At the same time, Carlyle never describes the distinctive physical features of the Milesian, leaving the reader in the throes of a scopic drive to discern national character in the faces of passersby. Like the symptoms of the diseased national body that require scrutiny, the faces of the working-class must be read constantly for signs of racial difference that they may express.

Carlyle's complex representation of the “wild Milesian” reveals that his understanding of Irishness in 1839 exists at the crossroads of two discourses. At the start of “Chartism,” Carlyle claims that Irish national character has been created by historical conditions, centuries of poverty and misrule that led to the degradation of the people as a whole. As we have seen, this difference has solidified into a permanent, irreversible identity that is contained in and expressed upon the surface of Irish bodies. Therefore, Carlyle's construction of Irishness contains a racialist and racist dimension, but one which constructs race as a mutable biological identity forged by the contingencies of history. This logic is in keeping with Etienne Balibar's suggestion that, while the distinction between cultural racism and biological racism can be a useful tool of analysis, it is important to remember that “culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin” (22). Indeed, in the case of Carlyle, cultural racism imagines history as an agent which transforms culture into nature.

This racial imaginary then ineluctably slides into and becomes inextricable from a discourse on racial genealogy which implies an immutable ancient basis for the national character of the Irish. For, as Carlyle's descriptive term “Milesian” suggests, he imagines Irishness as originating from racial descent as well as historical conditions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the term “Milesian” signified a racial mythology which traced the origins of the Irish people to ancestors in Egypt and Spain who eventually settled in Ireland.¹⁴

This genealogy was widely disseminated in work of the Scottish scholar MacPherson, texts with which Carlyle was familiar. When Carlyle invokes this account of racial origins, he differentiates the genealogy of the Irish people from the English who can claim an Anglo-Saxon heritage which becomes critical to Carlyle in his mythus of empire as Britain's national and racial destiny. Therefore, the Irish difference of which he writes is simultaneously the result of a historically contingent process of degeneration and of racial descent; it is expressed in an articulation of cultural racism and biological racism.

Hence, the transformation of Britain occasioned by the Act of Union, industrialization, and subsequent immigration is not only economic, cultural, and political, but ultimately racial. Carlyle imagines that a blood transfusion of sorts has taken place, and the anarchy which is Irishness circulates through the veins of Britain's national body. Following the depiction of the wild Milesian, he describes this process as an invasion:

Here, Carlyle anticipates the “cure” for the condition of England question which he presents at the close of “Chartism” – the global emigration of surplus British workers as the agents of Britain's imperial destiny. Irish immigration to Britain is the unfortunate circumstance which makes the emigration of the British working classes necessary. In a reworking of colonial discourse, standard iconography of the engulfment of new territories and their subsequent cultural, social and political regeneration is inverted into a dystopic narrative of the counter-colonization of Britain. Once the British state absorbs Ireland into the U.K. and Irish immigrants begin to enter Britain, the fantasy of the civilizing mission, of the march of progress through the spread of English government and culture around the globe, is replaced by a reverse trajectory. Two racially distinct, masculine nations¹⁵

– the “Saxon men” and “the uncivilized Irishman” – struggle to occupy Britain. As the militarized might of the Saxons fails, they are subsumed by “a force of men armed only with rags, ignorance, and nakedness” who stand as the phantasmatic antithesis of Britishness. Here we see a paranoid fantasy in which colonial violence is turned against the imperial center which is then engulfed and its national subjects expelled.

For Carlyle, the portentous result is that the colonization of the working classes is almost complete. Indeed in the fourth chapter of “Chartism,” the reader discovers that the “finest peasantry in the world” does not describe England's working class; rather, the phrase refers ironically to Irish immigrants who are “streaming in on us daily” (141). In the end, Union allows England to be consumed by her dangerous colony, and “Ireland, now for the first time, in such strange circuitous way, does find itself embarked in the same boat with England, to sail together, or to sink together; the wretchedness of Ireland, slowly but inevitably, has crept over to us and become our own wretchedness” (140).

Victorian respondents as well as recent Carlyle scholars have criticized “Chartism” for its lack of proposed solutions for the disease which Carlyle so extensively diagnoses. Indeed Carlyle does not offer any viable suggestions for remedying the crisis produced by post-Union Irish immigration. He ends his pamphlet with two propositions – education of the working-class and emigration of the British working classes in the service of imperial expansion. While Carlyle barely mentions the “wild Milesian” when suggesting these measures, it is possible that, like other politicians and commentators of the 1830s who imagined schemes of resettling the Irish in the New World,¹⁶

he had hopes for directing the “third Sanspotatoe” to the colonies rather than Britain. He gestures to this solution when he mentions “American forests [that] lie untilled” while Irish immigrants flood a nation which lacks the employment they seek. Still, no more explicit reference is made to government-subsidized plans for Irish immigration.

Perhaps to look for such concrete propositions in Carlyle's pamphlet is beside the point though. Instead, what is most important about “Chartism” is not the suggestion of any palliative measure, but the text's transformation of the discourse that articulates British national crisis. I want to suggest that, by disseminating a discourse of Irish difference in 1839, Carlyle's analysis of Irish immigration itself serves as a kind of solution for the “condition of England question.” In his essay, “Class Racism,” Etienne Balibar writes suggestively of a transformation in nationalist ideology that begins in early Victorian Britain:

Carlyle's influential anti-Irish politics and constructions of Irishness participate in just the displacement that Balibar describes. The phantasmatic figure of the “wild Milesian” and the terrifying image of the imperial nation colonized by “savage” immigrants – these Carlylean discourses perform the exclusion and expulsion of those who are simultaneously “foreigners … immigrants and colonial subjects.” In other words, Carlyle's racist anti-immigrant politics postulates a consolidating vision of British national identity that synthesizes the working classes with the rest of Britain through the marginalization of Irish subjects. In the face of the historical crises precipitated by Union, industrialization and large-scale immigration, Carlyle relies on the discourse of race to redraw the boundary lines of nationality and to subordinate the potentially revolutionary difference of class to the difference between citizens and colonial subjects, between British and Irish, between Saxon and Milesian Celt.

For Carlyle, this refiguring of the British nation in relation to Irish national character is one of the prophylactics that might prevent a revolution in Britain. He writes:

This passage begins with a rejection of the apocalyptic vision of degeneration that Carlyle presented earlier in “Chartism.” Employing the rhetorical strategy of a ominous warning, Carlyle cautions that Irish immigrants might awaken an essential “Berserkir-rage” hidden at the racial core of the British, one which until now has been sublimated into the work of civilization. As the catalysts for the violent disaffection of the British proletariat, the Irish have disturbed the racial temperament of the Saxons now that “[w]ith this strong silent people have the noisy vehement Irish now at length got common cause made.” This statement refers not only to the “common cause” created by Union and immigration, but to developing political alliances between British proletarian radicals and some Irish anti-colonial nationalists commonly lamented in anti-radical ideology.¹⁷

I call attention to this passage because it explains the ideological function of the nexus of anti-Irish racism and Saxon nationalism that we find at work in “Chartism.” This ideology serves to redirect the “rage” of the masses from the ruling classes and the British state into a xenophobic channel, diverting it towards the Irish immigrants in their midst. Identifying the Irish as the limit of a raced British citizenship disrupts real and potential political organizations which might encompass working class radicals and immigrant colonial subjects; it also resolves the crises of national integrity created by Union. In Balibar's words, the category of immigration functions as “a solvent of ‘class consciousness’.” (20) Carlyle's anti-Irish racism and his vision of Britain hegemonize the British working classes by interpellating them as members of a racially homogenous nation of Saxons; class politics is subordinated to the imperative to reconsolidate national identity in the face of immigration. This political project requires an identification of the racial character of the Irish; the “wild Milesian” must be incorporated into the national mythus and expelled as its other.

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VERY LITTLE CRITICAL ATTENTION has been directed to the central place of Irish immigration in Engels's earliest work on the English proletariat, The Condition of the Working Class in England. For example, Steven Marcus's comprehensive study, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, seldom mentions Engels's analysis of Irish immigration to Britain; he describes the chapter titled “Irish Immigration” as an appendage of sorts “which acts as a footnote to and additional confirmation of the arguments advanced in the chapter on competition” (204). In his groundbreaking history, The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson writes a short section on the Irish that ends with an affirmation of Engels's analysis of Irish immigration as “the precipitate which brought the more disciplined and reserved English workers to the point of political action.” Thompson acknowledges that “[w]e may dispute Engels' language of ‘nature’ and ‘race”’ concerning the Irish, but “we need only replace these terms to find that his judgement is valid” (443). Besides for this brief, illogical disavowal of “nature” and “race,” Thompson does not undertake any substantive engagement with these terms or with their critical place within Engels's understanding of the condition and politicization of the working-class in England.

As Marcus points out, Engels's small chapter on “Irish Immigration” appears after his explication of competition between workers for employment. In “Competition,” Engels first employs the example of the Irish immigrant to demonstrate how both wages and standard of living are lowered by the introduction of competition. He writes:

Despite what Engels describes as the “uncivilised” state of Irish immigrants, they play a key economic role as “surplus population,” a reserve of labor power “available to produce the great quantities of goods which are needed during the few months when the business boom reaches its climax” (97–98). However, Engels is absolutely clear that “the real reason for the existence of the superfluous population is the competition of the workers among themselves” which allows factory owners to lengthen the work day and to lower wages (94). These passages reveal the significance of Irishness within the dialectical materialism that Engels is beginning to theorize in 1845. In fact, he argues that the biological material of Irish cultural and racial character is the synergist for an intense state of competition that subjugates workers within the English labor market so efficiently. Therefore, the influence of competition would not be nearly so effective without the introduction of a surplus population which is specifically Irish. The culturally specific standard of living which Irish immigrants carry with them is represented with a familiar Carlylean portrait of domestic chaos and drunken disorder.

In the next chapter on “Irish Immigration,” the racialist dimension of Engels's analysis becomes completely clear. The chapter begins with a brief statistical account of Irish immigration to Great Britain which estimates that “over a million have emigrated to Britain, and fifty thousand more are coming in year by year” (104). Engels then continues his detailed description of the Irish national character, asserting that these immigrants are “uncouth, improvident, and addicted to drink” and “introduce their brutal behavior” into the English proletariat. However, he interrupts himself with a sudden exclamatory gesture: “Let Thomas Carlyle speak on this subject.” At this point, the text is overtaken by an extended citation of “Chartism” taken directly from the “wild Milesian” passage. Carlyle's text serves an evidentiary function, supporting Engels's previous assertions concerning Irish national character. Engels follows this citation by stating: “Carlyle's description is a perfectly true one if we overlook his exaggerated and prejudiced defamation of the Irish national character” (105). However, this disclaimer, which resonates with that of E. P. Thompson, proves empty; despite the brief acknowledgement of Carlyle's “defamation” of Irishness, Engels uses this passage as a springboard for his own racialist characterization of Irish immigrants and their influence on the British proletariat.

Indeed Engels proceeds to enumerate the same essential Irish attributes that Carlyle described in “Chartism.” Like Carlyle, Engels rehearses a catalog of traits which characterize Irishness – indolence, intemperance, unsanitary living habits which pollute Britain, and a general lack of “civilisation.” For example, writing of Irish “filth,” he provides accounts of the “abnormal method of rearing livestock in large towns” which includes allowing pigs to share family sleeping quarters and “the custom of living in one room” which has not “spread widely among the English.” These stereotypical anecdotes combine ideas about laziness, domestic disorder, animality, and the pollution of the nation. Thus, while industrialization sets in motion the degeneration of working class conditions, the infusion of Irish customs into the nation intensifies such degradation. Engels asserts that “[I]t is not surprising that a social class already degraded by industrialisation and its immediate consequences should be still further degraded by having to live alongside and compete with the uncivilised Irish” (107). In other words, the capitalist mode of production can only produce the most intense degeneration of the proletariat when coupled with the effects of colonialism and immigration.

If Engels intends only to recapitulate the stereotypes of Irishness in “Chartism,” then what do we make of his disclaimer in which he seems to reject Carlyle's “exaggerated and prejudiced defamation of the Irish national character”? We can read this ambivalent textual moment as typical of Engels's desire to have two seemingly contradictory discourses at work in his analysis of Irish immigrants. At times, Engels seems to take an anti-essentialist position, attributing those characteristics that he notes in the Irish population to the living conditions found in Ireland as a result of colonial rule. He writes that, “[s]ociety neglects the Irish and allows them to sink into a state bordering upon savagery. How can society complain when the Irishman does, in fact, become a habitual drunkard?” (107). This analysis allows Engels to incorporate Irish immigrants into his understanding of the capitalist mode of production, making the Irish subject to the same exploitation as the British working-class. He also begins to find justification for the Irish discontent which becomes so central to his vision of impending revolution in Britain.

However, this anti-essentialism is subsumed by an insistence that Irish national character is ultimately racial in origin. If Irishness was produced solely by historical conditions, then reform might remedy the problem, a possibility which Engels rejects wholesale. As we will see, in order for Engels to press Irish immigrants into the service of revolutionary politics, their national character must be innate and immutable. Therefore, Engels posits race as the basis of Irish difference even more explicitly than Carlyle. In “Irish Immigration,” he writes, “One may depend upon seeing mainly Celtic faces, if ever one penetrates into a district which is particularly noted for its filth and decay.” The presence of Irish faces serves as an index of squalor, and racial and national character are written onto Irish bodies in the form of visible, detectable physical difference: “These faces are quite different from those of the Anglo-Saxon population and are easily recognisable.” Again, language and accent serve as a supplementary indices of Irishness, as Engels writes, “The Irish, of course, can also be identified by their accent, for the true Irishman seldom loses the sing-song, lilting brogue of his native country. I have even heard the native Irish language spoken in the most densely-populated parts of Manchester” (105).

In a later chapter titled “The Proletariat on the Land,” Engels extends his racialist analysis, arguing:

In other words, Irish poverty finds its cause in a national disposition which is the direct expression of racial identity. According to Engels, race singularly determines the socioeconomic conditions in Ireland which are carried by Irish immigrants to the new locations in which they settle. He also insists on the affinity of the Irish with “the Latin races such as the French and Italians”; this comparison gestures towards a shared racial genealogy with nations imagined to have a revolutionary disposition expressed in their national history and sets up the Irish as a potential revolutionary force in Britain.

If such a discourse of race allows Carlyle to create a schism within the working-classes of the late 1830s through a reconsolidated notion of Englishness and the incitement of xenophobic sentiment, then what ideological work does this discourse perform for Engels? In fact, the discourse of Irish racial difference allows Engels to imagine a reparation of the schism that is enacted by Carlyle's anti-Irish racism. Engels finds a way to contest both the displacement of “the markers of dangerousness and heredity from the ‘labouring classes’ as a whole on to foreigners, in particular immigrants and colonial subjects” (Balibar 210), and the redirection of proletarian discontent from the dominant classes to immigrant populations. However, he accomplishes this not by contesting or dispensing with the racialism; instead, he works within the discourse of Irish difference and attempts to articulate it with his own revolutionary politics.

In the chapter that follows “Irish Immigration,” Engels continues his exploration of the effect of the Irish on the British working-class, writing:

At this moment, we can see how Engels envisions the effect of Irish immigration as a productive force fuelling the dialectic of history towards revolution. He redeploys the discourse of the disease of the social body to represent the capitalist mode of production, but he argues that the disease cannot be cured; rather it must be brought “to its climax” through the heightening of class conflict into a “cataclysm.” In order for this to occur, the Irish must transform Britain not only economically and culturally but most importantly racially:

“The Irish character,” which Engels has identified as racial in origin, transforms the fixed temperament of the English proletariat. As an innately “stolid, patient, and sensible” subject, the English worker does not possess the “fiery temperament” necessary to incite a dramatic political revolution; Irish immigrants must provide the ignition for revolutionary upheaval. In other words, the racial temperament of the Irish is transfused into the British masses, transforming the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland and the political union between working-class radicals and Irish nationalists into a racial union as well. This union is created through cross-cultural contact and biological mixing, “daily contact” and “intermarriage.” The suggestion of “intermarriage” implies that reproduction allows for the materialization of working-class subjects who literally embody the double racial character that is ideal for revolutionary action. Therefore, at the crux of Engels's argument, miscegenation becomes a necessary catalyst for revolution in England.

The consequences of this racial fusion are two fold. First, as the above passage demonstrates, the gulf between the working class and the bourgeoisie is transformed from an economic division into an immutable division of race. As a result, “[t]he middle classes have more in common with every other nation in the world than with the proletariat which lives on their own doorsteps” (139). Engels rethinks Disraeli's infamous description of class difference as the bifurcation of Britain into “two nations” and reconstructs that division along the axis of race. This new profound split makes class conflict more intense, and less able to be ameliorated by any prophylactic measures such as Reform legislation or even the extension of suffrage that Chartists demand. In an inversion of Carlyle's project, for Engels, racialism does not produce a fantasy of national reconciliation but provides the condition of possibility for the destruction of British national cohesion.

Second, the transfusion of Irish blood into the British national body “add[s] an explosive force to English society” (309). What must be transmitted is not simply racial difference, but a racial character which contains within it the means to trigger revolution. Since Engels constructs the Irish as “passionate,” mercurial and fiery, Irish bodies carry within them a predisposition to violence not possessed by the British proletariat. Engels reminds his readers that “[t]he Irish people have resisted oppression in two ways” – agitation for repeal of the Union and “acts of violence.” He states that “[c]rime is endemic in the rural districts [of Ireland] and not a day passes without the perpetration of some serious breach of the law. Nor do the Irish hesitate to kill their oppressors …” (309). Therefore, the most important element of Irishness is a predisposition towards violence – a raced tendency to resist oppression through brutal and criminal means. Through contact, intermarriage, and miscegenation, the Irish propensity for transgressing the law and for the murder of oppressors will infect the English worker with the temperament necessary to strike out against the bourgeoisie and the British state. In other words, the English working-class are faced with their own racial lack which translates into the failure of their radical politics; a transfusion of Irish blood is required to hasten the development of class consciousness and then to transform Chartism into active, violent upheaval. For Engels, working-class identity in England cannot be theorized without an account of the racial consequences of immigration; racial discourse works as an indispensable element in the dialectical movement of history toward class conflict and revolution.

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MUCH SCHOLARSHIP in Victorian Studies has been devoted to understanding class identities and class politics in Britain. In the last decade, this work has been supplemented by generative studies that focus on national identity in Britain and the interarticulation of British national and class identities with the projects of colonialism and imperialism. With my readings of Carlyle and Engels, I hope to call attention to a crucial elision in some of this attention to constructions of “Englishness” and of the English working-class in particular. It is often forgotten that during the nineteenth century, the British nation itself contained a colony through the Act of Union of 1800. In addition, during the early Victorian period, the first mass immigration of colonial subjects into England began to occur. Constructions of the English working-class in this period cannot be extricated from discourses on Irish immigration, attendant notions of Irish racial difference, and the specter of English-Irish miscegenation. Therefore, this essay insists on the importance of Ireland to the analysis of Victorian class and national identities and on the general relevance of Irish studies to scholarship on Victorian Britain.

In addition, a reevaluation of the discourses of Irishness in Carlyle's “Chartism” and Engels's study of the English working class allows us to rethink early Victorian constructions of national and class identities in a way that breaks out of a rigid binary schema of the relationship between colony and metropole. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, colonial subjects were not only “out there” in the colonies but a problem “at home,” playing a constitutive role in the way that early Victorians thought about national integrity, English and British identity, and the working-class who composed the majority of the imperial nation and who agitated to be recognized as such. British national identity is not only constructed in relation to ideas about distant racialized populations around the globe. Nineteenth-century ideas of “Englishness” and “Britishness” had to reckon with the immediate presence of colonial subjects within the nation's borders. Capitalist and colonialist expansion required ideologies in which Britain worked to represent itself as an organic whole conceptualized through the exteriorization of the Irish nation now harnessed to it. Any political intervention into Victorian class politics had to come to terms with the way that race served such an ideological function.